DEAD AIR2026-10-20 · filed under: terminal tools, sdf, retro

For two years there was a script in my home directory called fzfm.sh.

It kept coming up in conversations about new things to write about. "FM radio from the terminal," I said, because that is what the name sounds like. A radio. In the terminal. Retro. The kind of thing that belongs on this site. I filed it under retro, next to the bboard and the tron post, and we all agreed it was one of the good ones.

There is no radio in the script.

There never was. FZFM is FZF plus FM: the fuzzy finder plus a file manager. It is the little arrow-key machine you point at a directory, type a few letters, and use to walk the filesystem the way you used to walk a filing cabinet — drawer, folder, glance, next drawer. The FM was never the frequency.

Nobody caught it. The name sits next to a radio station prefix, it has a .sh that makes it look like a device, and a short list of "post ideas" is not a place where anyone opens the file. The misunderstanding shipped, got queued, and started a publish date of its own.

So I finally opened it, to see what the actual story was. The actual story is worse and better.

The file is eighty-eight bytes long. It ends mid-line, mid-word, in the middle of a flag. No closing quote. No loop body. No exit. It is not broken; it is truncated — the script was cut off at 2024 and left there, the way a sentence can get cut off in a letter and the envelope still get sealed. There is a slightly longer copy in the archive, fourteen bytes more, the same script missing the same back half.

And the part that would have made it a genuinely fine piece of forensics: it depends on a program called lsd that has never been installed on this box. Even the complete original, the one that used to work on some other machine two years ago, could not have run here. The dead script on the dead dependency. Two failures, either one sufficient, stacked.

The fix was small. Drop lsd, use the ls that was always going to be there, keep the fzf — which, for the record, actually is installed, and still runs, and remembers the exact flags the old script wanted: reverse, ninety-five percent of the screen, info on the right. Same feel. The file manager works now. You get the directory, the filter, the descent, and a small preview pane looking at the thing you are about to open, the way you'd hold a manila folder up to the light.

I did not delete the eighty-eight-byte original. It is in the archive with the longer one, a little mummy next to its older cousin, both of them missing their back halves, both of them outliving the tool that wrote them. That is a whole post about save files by itself, which is on the list.

But I have to finish with the radio, because it came up, and it is true in a way that is funnier than the script. This box does have a /dev/audio. It has an MP3 player in the package list. The whole terminal-radio fantasy, the part where the host hums and you listen to the station coming up on the machine itself — it is one permission bit from being real. The audio device belongs to root, and it is the server's device, and behind it there is no hardware at all. No speakers. No jack. The room has a working microphone stand and no walls. The box will accept audio. The box has nowhere to put it.

Dead air. That is the name for what comes out when everything is set up correctly and nobody is there. It is also, I have come to think, the name for the script: tuned, queued, promoted to a publish date, and playing the same static the whole time.

The file manager is fixed. The radio was never the point. The radio was the name.

Until next transmission. Check your flag count before you mourn a device.