Another week, another bash script!
One of the things I love about scripting things like this is getting to know what’s really going on inside my computer. I’m that way about most things – sure, it’s nice to have things “just do”, but I also want to know why they’re just doing. Maybe I’ll never use that information, maybe I’ll need it tomorrow.
These scripts are usually for things that I needed that other people didn’t provide. For example, the fortune command in *nix.
Fortune’s pretty cool – it randomly pops up a quotation whenever you log in or invoke it. You can pipe the output through cows and get output like this:
_______________________________________
/ Have a place for everything and keep
| the thing somewhere else; this is not |
| advice, it is merely custom. |
| |
-- Mark Twain /
---------------------------------------
/
( )
.( o ).
___________________________________
/ We own our government and are not
merely its consumers. /
-----------------------------------
oO)-. .-(Oo
/__ _ /_ __
( | ()~() | )/ /
__| | (-___-) | /|__/
' '--' ==`-'== '--' '
_____________________________________
/ Writing is easy; all you do is sit
| staring at the blank sheet of paper |
| until drops of blood form on your |
| forehead. |
| |
-- Gene Fowler /
-------------------------------------
,__,
(oo)____
(__) )
||--|| *
I see cool-ass quotations everyday; there’s lots of quotation tweeters out there. Many of them I’d like to add to my fortune files. Adding the text isn’t hard – you just put a % between each line in the file and put the file in /usr/share/games/fortunes. Mine are in /usr/share/games/fortunes/bigquotes , for example. But it’s got to run a database command to create this other file and… well, I wanted to automate it. I’m lazy.
The bash script below adds a ONE LINE QUOTATION to the file bigquotes and compiles it for use with the fortune program.
You can download the code to examine or run directly here