
Pretend to be busy or waiting for your computer when you should actually be doing real work! Impress people with your insane multitasking skills. Just open a few instances of genact
and watch the show. genact
has multiple scenes that pretend to be doing something exciting or useful when in reality nothing is happening at all.
Installation
You don't have to install anything! For your convenience, prebuilt binaries for Linux, OSX and Windows are provided here that should run without any dependencies. Additionally, there is a web version at https://svenstaro.github.io/genact/
It's compatible with FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows 10 (it needs a recent Windows 10 to get ANSI support) and most modern web browsers that support WebAssembly.
On FreeBSD: You don't have to do anything special here. Just run
pkg install genact
genact
On Linux: Download genact-linux
from the releases page and run
chmod +x genact-linux
./genact-linux
On macOS: Download genact-osx
from the releases page and run
chmod +x genact-osx
./genact-osx
A homebrew package is also available. To install it this way, run
brew install genact
On macOS, you can also install via MacPorts:
sudo port install genact
On Windows: Download genact-win.exe
from the releases page and double click it.
It is also available on Scoop:
scoop install genact
With Cargo: If you have a somewhat recent version of Rust and Cargo installed, you can run
cargo install genact
genact
Running
To see a list of all available options, you can run
./genact -h
or
cargo run -- -h
or (on Docker)
docker run -it --rm svenstaro/genact -h
Usage
genact 0.12.0
Sven-Hendrik Haase <[email protected]>
A nonsense activity generator
USAGE:
genact [OPTIONS]
OPTIONS:
--exit-after-modules <EXIT_AFTER_MODULES> Exit after running this many modules
--exit-after-time <EXIT_AFTER_TIME> Exit after running for this long (format example: 2h10min)
-h, --help Print help information
-l, --list-modules List available modules
-m, --modules <MODULES> Run only these modules [possible values: weblog, mkinitcpio, simcity, memdump, composer, ansible, bootlog, docker_build, download, botnet,
kernel_compile, cargo, cc, docker_image_rm, cryptomining]
-s, --speed-factor <SPEED_FACTOR> Global speed factor [default: 1]
-V, --version Print version information
Web usage
In the web version, you can run specific modules by providing them as ?module
parameters like this: https://svenstaro.github.io/genact?module=cc&module=memdump
You can also provide a ?speed-factor
like this: https://svenstaro.github.io/genact?speed-factor=5
Building
You should have a recent version of rust and cargo installed.
Then, just clone it like usual and cargo run
to get output:
git clone https://github.com/svenstaro/genact.git
cd genact
cargo run --release
Releasing
This is mostly a note for me on how to release this thing:
- Make sure
CHANGELOG.md
is up to date. cargo release --dry-run
cargo release
- Releases will automatically be deployed by Github Actions.
- Docker images will automatically be built by Docker Hub.
- Update Arch package.
More? Visit: https://github.com/svenstaro/genact and support author!
Author

- Freelance consultant, DevOps and automation connoisseur, Arch Linux developer, hobbyist game and graphics programmer. Available for remote contracting.
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