Converting asciinema output to gif

gifimagestypescript

Can I convert a .json file; generated by a program like asciinema; into an animated .gif?

Yes. While asciinema doesn't provide this natively, there are tools out there that can facilitate that for you.

You can create your local recording like so:

asciinema rec my_recording.json

And then feed that into a tool like asciicast2gif:

./asciicast2gif my_recording.json my_recording.gif

found a solution: identify, part of the imagemagick package, does exactly what I need

$ identify color.jpg 
> color.jpg JPEG 1980x650 1980x650+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 231KB 0.000u 0:00.000

This can easily be done using ImageMagick

identify -format '%n %i\n' -- *.gif

12 animated.gif
1 non_animated.gif

identify -format %n prints the number of frames in the gif; for animated gifs, this number is bigger than 1.

(ImageMagick is probably readily available in your distro's repositories for an easy install)