Alright Hashnode, what do you think of a quick shell lesson as a first blog post?
I use zsh as my main shell in linux, extended with oh-my-zsh, and I wanted to share a bit of my zsh configuration file, called a .zshrc file. I use this little bit to get a random emoji assigned as my terminal prompt
animal_array=(🤑👹☠️🙈🐧🐙)
animal_index=$(($RANDOM % ${#animal_array[@]}))
animal_emoji=${animal_array[$animal_index+1]}
SPACESHIP_CHAR_PREFIX=$animal_emoji
To summarize shortly, I'm defining a list of emojis, then randomly picking one of them and storing it in a variable. Then I'm having my terminals theme use that emoji as the character prompt.
I think this little code piece is a nice lesson on how arrays work in the shell, so lets go through and break this down to see what we are doing bit by bit.
Defining the list 
animal_array=(🤑👹☠️🙈🐧🐙)
Alright here I am declaring an array with parentheses and populating it with 6 elements (or emojis in this case), each one separated with a space mind you, no commas in this language!
Then I assign the array to the variable "animal_array". Note that in zsh (and by extension bash which has almost 1:1 syntax) there must be no spaces around the equals sign.
Getting our emoji 
animal_index=$(($RANDOM % ${#animal_array[@]}))
Now we want to pick an emoji from the list. We use ${} around our array to print a value. In the brackets [ ] we put the index of the emoji we want. @ says we want all elements. The # says we want the count of items.
$RANDOM is a bash function that returns an int between 0-32767. The % is an interesting operand called 'modulo'. It returns the remainder of dividing $RANDOM by the count. So even though we may get a huge rand number, it will always be under the count and in bounds of our array
Then we use $(( )) around our expression to indicate that we will be performing a math expression, and that we expect to get a number. What we should now have is a random number between 0 and the length of our list, so we store it in animal_index. What this also means is that this code should work no matter how big our list is! Feel free to put as many emojis as you want.
Storing that sumbitch 
animal_emoji=${animal_array[$animal_index+1]}
Finally, select an element in the array, saying we want the one at spot animal_index+1.
The reason for the +1 is because zsh is a 1-indexed language, which means arrays in zsh start counting at 1, as opposed to 0 like most languages, and in this case the number stored in animal_index will be between 0-5.
Now we have our random emoji, ready to insert into your terminal theme however you do. For my oh-my-zsh theme, I use spaceship prompt
SPACESHIP_CHAR_PREFIX=$animal_emoji
Well I hope you liked my first blog post! I think I may have to make another post describing what oh-my-zsh is and how to install it. 😉
Please, let me see what kind of configurations you all have in the comments. Or feel free to ask any questions or help understanding something. I look forward to getting to know you all more!
