Messages at login

[Chris Bier]

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|>-----Original Message-----
|>From: Chris Bier
|>
|>MOTD is Message of the day.  It displays a message that is
|>displayed on
|>login to give any info the admin wants to convey to all users without
|>sending an email to all.  AFAIK, /etc/motd is just a file and there is
|>no daemon.
|>
|>Fortune reads fortune files with quotes and displays a random entry.
|>It's just a program and has nothing to do with logins.  It
|>can, however
|>be added to .bash_profile, .profile, etc to display a random
|>quote for a
|>user's login.
|>
Brian Densmore wrote:
| So what you're saying is that it would be possible to
| write a daemon that could read a random spot in the
| fortune database at random intervals and stick it in
| /etc/motd? And no one has done this yet? Of
| course it would mean no one could personalize it as it
| would be system-wide. Thanks for removing my ignorance on
| the subject.
|
|

I wouldn't bother writing a daemon, I'd just make a cron job to remove
the old fortune entry from /etc/motd, call fortune, and add the output
to motd.
Something like:

0 0 0 * * sed -i '/---/,$d' /etc/motd; echo "---" >> /etc/motd; fortune
|> /etc/motd

This deletes everything from a line with just "---" in the /etc/motd
until the end, adds "---" back in, then appends the output of fortune to
/etc/motd at midnight every Sunday.

Chris
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