Oh wise and beneficent monks,

I am creating Secret Santa script. Being prone to overengineering, I plan to put a link in cron.yearly and use sendmail via nbsmtp to distribute the results (it's a home machine so I worry about a local mail server getting blacklisted). I found a great example here.

My problem arises because I don't want any pairing repeated in two consecutive years. The only solution I can think of is sending a master list to an independent authority and manually collecting it after the date. This would make the whole automation concept kind of inane.

Is there a way to store this mapping information locally where it would be (practically) inaccessible, at least until January 1? I don't plan on cheating, but a file named SantaList.txt on my desktop would probably raise some eyebrows.

Your humble initiate,

Ken

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