ROBOTFINDSKITTEN(6)

📦 version 2.8284271.702, in arch rolling, debian bookworm, debian trixie, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixpkgs unstable, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 ROBOTFINDSKITTEN 💖

okay so bestie, gather round, because this is the Games Manual page for robotfindskitten(6) and it is genuinely one of the most iconic little things in all of Unix. no cap. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

robotfindskitten — help robot find kitten 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

robotfindskitten [ -n number ] [ -s seed ] [ -f filename ]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so in this game? you are robot (#). yes, the little pound-sign-looking guy. and your whole entire job, your one purpose, your main character mission, is to find kitten. 🐱

the thing is, the universe is not making it easy for you. there are, like, a lot of other things in there that are not kitten. they're collectively known as Non Kitten Items, or NKIs, and they are all up in your way. robot has to actually touch an item to figure out whether it's kitten or not. and then the game just ends when robot finds kitten. periodt. 🌈

now, how do you move this little guy around? you have OPTIONS, bestie:

  • arrow keys — the classic. 💫
  • the EMACS keys — ^N, ^P, ^B and ^F for down, up, left, and right.
  • the keypad keys — and yes, all 8 directions, not just the boring 4.
  • the nethack keys — all 8 directions too. hjklyubn is left, down, up, right, up-left, up-right, down-left and down-right. iykyk. 🧚

and because sometimes screens get cursed, you can press Ctrl-L at any time to redraw the screen. you can press q at any time to quit. and a good old-fashioned Ctrl-C quits too, because some traditions are sacred. 💀

🫶 OPTIONS 🫶

  • -s — you can optionally specify the number of Non Kitten Items to use with this one. the default is 20. ✨
  • -t — you can set the random-number seed with this, which is normally initialized from the system clock. this may be useful for debugging. 🎀
  • -f — you can supply an arbitrary file from which to draw NKIs using this. 🌸

💜 FILES 💜

robotfindskitten(6) reads all of the files in the ~/.robotfindskitten and /usr/share/games/robotfindskitten directories. every single line of every file matching *.nki becomes the description of a Non Kitten Item. 🌟

lines beginning with # or % are ignored. which is lowkey the best part, because it means you can put comments in your nki files and it means fortune(6) files can be used. iconic. 💅

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

robotfindskitten(6) uses the HOME environment variable to find the ~/.robotfindskitten directory. that's it, that's the whole vibe check. 🦋

⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

  • 0 — if robot found kitten 🎉
  • 1 — if you quit, or if there was a problem 😭
  • the signal number — if robotfindskitten(6) exits gracefully due to a signal 💀

👑 A FINAL THOUGHT 👑

okay bestie this part is a whole mood and i am not going to water it down for you.

Day and night I feverishly worked upon the machine, creating both a soul which could desire its goal, and a body with which it could realize it. Many who saw my creation called it an abomination, and denied me grant money. But they could not dissuade me from my impossible task. It was a spectre that tormented me always, a ghost I had to give a form and a life, lest it consume me from the inside. And when at last my task was done, when the grey box on wheels was complete and when it, as well as I, knew what had to be done, I felt deep sympathy for the machine. For I had not destroyed the phantom, but merely exorcized it into another body. The robot knew not why this task had to be performed, for I could not imbue it with knowledge I did not myself posess. And at the same time, I felt a sweeping sense of relief sweep over me, that somehow, the dream that had driven me for my entire life had come one step closer to fruition.

"Gort, Klaatu Verada Nikto"

As I vocally activated the robot, I realized that it was following my instructions, but not out of any desire to obey me. Had I remained silent, it would have performed exactly the same operations. We were two beings controlled by the same force now. And yet, seeking vainly to hold some illusion of control over the machine I thought I had created, I gave my final command.

"GO!" I told the box as it began to roll out of my workshop into the frozen desert beyond. "FIND KITTEN!"

-- The Book of Found Kittens, pages 43-4, author unknown

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

💖 AUTHORS 💖

robotfindskitten was originally written by Leonard Richardson <leonardr@segfault.org> for DOS in 1997. He rewrote it for Linux in 1999. Since then robotfindskitten has been ported and/or rewritten for countless other platforms. The current POSIX code is based on code originally written by Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt@freeshell.org>.

The POSIX development team consists of:

  • Alexey Toptygin
  • David Griffith
  • Eric S. Raymond
  • Leonard Richardson
  • George Moffitt
  • Jake Berendes
  • Lukas Eklund
  • Neale Pickett
  • Nick Moffitt
  • Peter A. Peterson II
  • Phil Ulrich (Mac OS X)
  • Ryan Finnie (Debian Maintainer)
  • Sean Neakums

and that's the whole page, bestie 🥹 this one's from the Games Manual and it's dated October 11, 2005. go find that kitten. you got this. 🐱💖✨

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