Message scroller in a .signature

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$|=8;open X,$0;grep{s;#\s(.*)#\n;$m.=$1;meg}(<X>);; #        Put #
@n=qw;. o 0 O 0 o;;$s=22;$m=" "x$s.$m;$l=length $m; #       your #
for(0..2*$l){$r=substr($m,($_%$l),$s);$r.=substr($m #    message #
,0,$s-(length$r));print"  $n[$_%@n] ",$r," $n[$_%@n #      here. #
]  \r";select($8,$',$@,.1);}print" "x($s+$|*8),"\r" #  Have fun! #
[download]

An email .signature which will scroll your message across the screen, also has a 'heartbeat' animation at either side of the text.

I didn't want to obfuscate the message text itself, as I know that only a minority of the people that I send emails to actually use Perl. However, I would be grateful if anyone could offer suggestions on how I could make the code more obfuse.

Comment on Message scroller in a .signature Download Code

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Re: Message scroller in a .signature by jryan (Vicar) on Oct 24, 2001 at 00:59 UTC
First off, you can get rid of the constants. For instance, here is a devious way to set $\| equal to 8: `$\|=chr(ord(substr("\cX\c9",-1))-(1<<6^2));++$\|;` [download] Sure, its not great for golfs, but if obfu is your goal, this can certainly make someone spend a good portion of their lunch hour just figuring out the first statement. By that same token, you can change this: `print" "x($s+$\|*8),"\r"` [download] to this: `print" "x($s+((($\|^($\|<<($=<<($\|<<$\|))))>>($=/($\|<<$\|<<$\|)))<<$\|<<$\|)) +,"\r"` [download] Not the greatest golf in the world, but hey, its sexy :) Other than that, the program looks good. It scrolls too fast on my computer no matter how much I up the increment, but I can still see that it works. Nice job.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Message scroller in a .signature by jj808 (Hermit) on Oct 27, 2001 at 07:50 UTC
Update: I put my golf shoes on and made the code a bit smaller - it's now only 43 characters wide (without the message). This should prevent it from being trashed by mail clients which wrap at 70 columns. `#!/usr/bin/perl -w $,=' ';open X,$0;$m=$,x22;map{s;#\s(.)#$;# Put # $m.=$1;meg}(<X>);$\|++;$\="\r";$n='\\|/-';$l# your # =length$m;for(0..2$l){;$r=sprintf"%.22s",# message # substr($m,($_%$l),22).$m;$d=substr($n,$_%4# here. # ,1);print$,,$d,$r,$d;select($2,$',$@,.1);}# Have fun! #` [download] Also changed the animation from a heartbeat to a spinner.	[reply] [d/l]