/etc/motd summary

[Slawa Olhovchenkov]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 11:10:07AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:

> 
> On Sep 10, 2014, at 8:06 AM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Monday, September 08, 2014 08:24:00 PM Warren Block wrote:
> >> On Mon, 8 Sep 2014, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> >>> On 8 September 2014 17:46, Brooks Davis <brooks at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>>> On Mon, Sep 08, 2014 at 05:25:31PM -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> >>>>> for maximum bikeshed: what about adding a 'motd' command that, I
> >>>>> dunno, re-displays the motd? :P
> >>>> 
> >>>> How would someone who didn't know about /etc/motd ever find that?
> >>> 
> >>> Putting "Type 'motd' to see this information again" in the motd.
> >> 
> >> Or leave it the way it is, /etc/motd is just a file that is displayed,
> >> but instead of dumping it to stdout, interpret some kind of markup in
> >> it.
> >> 
> >> That's relatively high overhead considering the layout will still be
> >> limited to 80x24.  We'd probably be better off leaving it as is and
> >> moving most of the information to a man page, say support(1), which is
> >> mentioned by /etc/motd.
> > 
> > Yes.  You can use formatting if you have a 'man welcome'.  That might be the 
> > best way to provide a local, formatted copy of the proposed "welcome" page 
> > from earlier.  You could even create a very simple 'welcome' wrapper script 
> > that runs 'man welcome' so that in the motd you just have to say "run the 
> > welcome command".  No need for having to worry about having to figure out how 
> > to separate arguments from the command that way (which is the the problem we 
> > have now that requires double spaces since all the examples are commands that 
> > take arguments like 'man man').  For a command with no arguments you don't 
> > have to do that I think.
> 
> Stepping back from this problem a bit and refocusing on the original ask (I want to put ANSI escape sequences to punch things up a bit):
> 
> We have the terminal set (usually) by the time we cat /etc/motd. login.conf controls this with the welcome= parameter. We have two choices here.
> 
> One, allow the welcome string to start with | and have it be the command to run. This could be "man welcome" or something else canned. Flexible, but maybe not the best.
> 
> Another vector to this approach would be to allow /etc/motd to start with #!/usr/bin/man (or some other magic) and have it run through a fixed program like man (and only man) instead of just being cat'd out. This would allow proper rendering on all devices in a way that's backwards compatible as well, but maybe with less security concerns. I like this better because it puts the message of the day file in control of today's message...
> 
> These tools would allow for a fancier rendition of whatever text is decided here as well as not violating POLA.

May be simple reduce /etc/motd to one line (FreeBSD ... 2014) and rest
of information by some programs, similar to fortune or man (from login
script).