motd question

[Louis LeBlanc]

On 08/26/03 01:20 PM, Joshua Oreman sat at the `puter and typed:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 11:02:55AM -0700 or thereabouts, Joshua Oreman wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 12:37:44PM -0400 or thereabouts, Louis LeBlanc wrote:
> > > Probably not possible, but I was wondering (and have for some
> > > time, though I can't find any info on it either way) whether
> > > /etc/motd is strictly a text in/text out file, or if there is a
> > > way to get it to execute a command, the output of which is to be
> > > included in the text output?
> > 
> > You could make it a FIFO and put a Perl script or something at the
> > other end, if you want dynamically-generated output.  [ ... ] Be
> > careful.
> 
> Really! This approach can come back and bite you in the butt.
> Basically, be absolutely sure the writer process is started during
> bootup. Otherwise it'll hang indefinitely when logging in; you need
> to drop to single-user to fix it.

Yeah, I really just wanted to get the output of an alias, but it's not
important enough to go through all that for.

I just figured it would be a pretty cool - although quite geeky thing
to have the real time printed out with each login:

The alias is as follows:
$ gtime

                    Right now, the official U.S. time is:
                                  16:20:43
                          Tuesday, August 26, 2003

and it's expansion is:
$ alias gtime 
alias gtime='lynx -dump http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5 | head -5'

Pretty interesting, but definitely not worth the hassle that would
obviously be required.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Lou
-- 
Louis LeBlanc               leblanc at keyslapper.org
Fully Funded Hobbyist, KeySlapper Extrordinaire :)
http://www.keyslapper.org                     Ô¿Ô¬

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