Rickroll the Terminal with curl

Ever wished you could find a new creative way to rickroll your particularly tech savvy friends? Just about nobody is fooled by the random YouTube links anymore, and URL shorteners alone aren’t always enough, but now you can bring the persistently annoying rickrolling to the Terminal of OS X and Linux by running a simple fairly innocuous looking command. What happens when you or the suspect runs it? You’ll get a full ASCII rendition of the infamous Rick Astley video but best of all it’s complete with audio, so be sure they have their speakers turned up or headphones on.

Give it a try yourself and then start rickrolling your friends. Turn your speakers on, launch Terminal, and run the following command:

curl -L http://bit.ly/10hA8iC | bash

The bit.ly link expands to the following github URL:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keroserene/rickrollrc/master/roll.sh | bash

Important note: It’s exceptionally bad security practice to blindly run random scripts found on the internet. This one happens to be open source, and the code is viewable on github for those that are curious in seeing how it works and determining if it’s reasonable given their own security and privacy standards.

Sit back and enjoy those 80’s dance moves in ASCII.

If you’re going to send this to a friend or colleague, be sure to use bitly or another URL shortener to hide the bash script, otherwise with it expanded it reads as “rickrollrc/master/roll.sh” making it quite obvious what’s about to happen.

Oh and if you’re a sys admin or have access to someones .bash_profile, you could really wreak some havoc by aliasing a common command to this, or even use it as your motd if you want to troll everyone that logs into a server or box.

Being April Fools Day, we can’t let the iOS users have all the fun, right?

Thanks to Peter for sending this in!