Tagline Rotator

Category:	E-Mail Programs
Author/Contact Info	Mike Lewis cajun cajun {at} cajuninc.com
Description:	Rotate those tired .signature taglines automatically. Put your taglines in the file $siginfile, one tagline per line. Setup a cron job to run the script every few minutes. Now you won't have to manually change your .signature line. Output looks something like this: -- Backup not found! A)bort, R)etry or P)anic? 10:25pm up 23:22, 6 users, load average: 1.04, 1.10, 1.14
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $debug=0; my $home='/home/users/somebody'; my $siginfile="$home/sig/sigfile"; my $tearline=" \n"; my $uptime=`uptime`; my $outfile="$home/\.signature"; open(INFILE,"$siginfile") or die "Can't open $siginfile :$!"; open(OUTFILE,">$outfile") or die "Sorry, but I can't write to $outfile + :$!"; my %hash; while(<INFILE>){ # build a hash with $. as key and $_ as value $hash{$.}=$_; } my $rand=rand($.); my @body; push (@body, $tearline); push (@body, qq( $hash{sprintf("%.0f", ($rand))})); push (@body, $uptime); if ($debug){ print @body; } else { print OUTFILE @body; } close INFILE; close OUTFILE;

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Re: Tagline Rotator by vroom (His Eminence) on Feb 09, 2001 at 11:47 UTC
I wrote one of these and changed my pine configuration so instead of piping an outgoing message to sendmail it ran the script to output my .signature and then passed it off to sendmail. CowboyNeal says mutt allows you to have a pipe in your sigfile settings which allows you to run the script every time you start composing a new message. vroom \| Tim Vroom \| vroom@cs.hope.edu	[reply]
Re: Re: Tagline Rotator by cajun (Chaplain) on Feb 09, 2001 at 12:15 UTC
Interesting thought. Thanks Tim. I also had thoughts about making it a daemon.	[reply]
Re: Tagline Rotator by Daddio (Chaplain) on May 29, 2001 at 07:46 UTC
cajun, I think this is a great script. It's simple and straightforward. I would like to point out a couple of things that I think would help. First, I might recommend putting the `open(OUTFILE,...)` and `close OUTFILE` into the same `else` section as the `print OUTFILE @body`. There's no sense opening and closing a file if you don't need to in debug mode (and it will erase whatever is there if you are in debug mode - no sense doing that, either). Second, and more importantly, the `sprintf("%.0f", ($rand)` code may return a 0. To counter that, I would recommend these two changes: One, change `my $rand=$rand($.);` to `my $rand = 0; $rand = int rand($.) until $rand != 0;` [download] Two, change `push (@body, qq( $hash{sprintf("%.0f", ($rand))}));` to `push (@body, qq( $hash{$rand}));` Hope this makes sense (it's been a long day :)! D a d d i o	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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