A really short little ditty to take a file delimited by '%' characters (on lines by themselves) then randomly select an entry, then print it to the .signature file.

Literally taken straight from my ~/scripts directory, all still hardcoded. Pick it to pieces, but remember it's just a hack :)

First few lines of my .signature.rot file. Note the first line is blank, and there needn't be a trailing newline at the end:

Leo: (July 23 - Aug. 22) When driving through the desert, you should
never stop and eat mysterious piles of birdseed, even if "FREE
BIRDSEED" signs are stuck in them.
%
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,
doesn't go away".
    -- Philip K. Dick
%
So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will
always triumph, because good is dumb.
    -- Dark Helmet
%
Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button. This ship will
self-destruct in three minutes.
%
Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden, or do
they write them down for you?
%
Yes, questions. Morphology, longevity, incept dates.
%
"Begun, this clone war has."
Donate to the House With No Sentence Structure. Dedicated to
assisting grammatically disadvantaged Jedi for over 900 years.
[download]

#!/usr/bin/perl

use IO::File;

$/ = "%";

open(FILE, "/home/hagus/.signature.rot");
while (<FILE>)
{
    $tmp = $_;
    $tmp =~ s/%//g;
    push @a, $tmp;
}
close(FILE);

my $fh = new IO::File("/dev/urandom", "r");

my $foo = $fh->read($value, 100);

$fh->close();

my $num = unpack("S*", $value);

my $index = $num % (@a + 0);

open(FILE, ">/home/hagus/.signature");
print FILE $a[$index] . "\n";
close(FILE);
[download]