motd in color

[Chuck Swiger]

Valeri Vassiliev wrote:
[ ... ]
> hi, want to to know if its possible to colorize the /etc/motd with
> escape sequences, if yes how ?

If you are willing assume the user is always going to be on a certain terminal 
type which supports color, yes, you can certainly add the terminal-specific 
ESC sequences to /etc/motd via an editor which supports binary input (emacs 
has a hex mode for this, for example).

It's probably not a great idea, though.  I'd be more tempted to write a C 
program which queried TERMCAP or use curses to deal with color properly if I 
thought it was worth the effort in the first place, although some shells (zsh, 
maybe bash) also have decent support for color in their scripts.

-- 
-Chuck