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From: merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art,comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Anyway to randomize sig files?
Date: 18 Dec 1994 00:15:28 GMT
Organization: Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA
Lines: 59
Message-ID: <MERLYN.94Dec17161528@linda.teleport.com>
References: <34550.stroheck@student.msu.edu>
 <3cppfl$mc9@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu>
	<3csckl$bru@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>
	<3cv671$sn6@adam.cc.sunysb.edu>
Reply-To: merlyn@stonehenge.com
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In-reply-to: bgriffin@ic.sunysb.edu's message of 17 Dec 1994 17:13:05 GMT
Xref: nntp.gmd.de alt.ascii-art:18179 comp.unix.shell:17843

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli the bearded <bgriffin@ic.sunysb.edu> writes:

Eli> Note cross posting.
Eli> In article <3csckl$bru@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
Eli> knassen@cochrane.bus.umich.edu (Kent Stefl Nassen) writes:
>>> *] >        Can someone tell me if there is a way to randomize sig files?
>> Here is a perl script I grabbed from somewhere.  It was originally set
>> up to put random one-line quotes in your .sig, but I modified it to
>> just randomize a group of .sig files.  Very simple.  I use it with pine
>> by aliasing pine to 'randsig; pine'.  Then, whenever pine is run, you
>> will get a random sig.  You can use the same aliasing trick for other
>> programs, assuming your shell allows aliases.

Eli> 	#!/location/of/perl
	
Eli> 	$home = "/your/home/directory";
Eli> 	srand(time|$$);
Eli> 	@files = <$home/sigs/*>;
Eli> 	$this = $files[rand(@files)];
	
Eli> 	`cp $this $home/.signature`;
	
Eli> Anybody either have or can quickly modify this to
Eli> be more friendly to the inode-imparied? My site has the
Eli> absurd idea that I should only have 800 files. At this
Eli> moment I am about 100 away from the limit. Lots of extra
Eli> files will not help. Putting all the files in a cpio or
Eli> ar archive would be great. Creating a new file format for
Eli> this is fine as well.

Well, put them all in the perl program then:

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	srand(time ^ $$); # not |, which loses information
	$/ = "\n%%\n";
	@sigs = <DATA>;
	open(SIG, ">.signature");
	print SIG $sigs[rand(@sigs)], "\n";
	__END__
	Here's a sig
	and it can have multiple lines
	%%
	Here's the second sig
	and it too
	can have multiple lines
	%%
	Here's another sig that has %% somewhere in it.
	%%
	And here's another sig.  Really!

There.  It's just one file, with the data in the program.  Perl is
Your Friend.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"
--
Name: Randal L. Schwartz / Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
Keywords: Perl training, UNIX[tm] consulting, video production, skiing, flying
Email: <merlyn@stonehenge.com> Snail: (Call) PGP-Key: (finger merlyn@ora.com)
Phrase: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon ... home of the California Raisins!"