Control $random output for motd?

[ypoora1]

So i'm making my MOTD, all fancy with ASCII art and colors and such. Now in one section, i want to print a quote that's randomly picked from a file and then printed in on every MOTD print. I'm already using a dynamic MOTD to show server info and uptime. Now the problem is i'm using "sed -n '$RANDOMp' /etc/motd-msg" to pick a random line and print it, but my file doesn't have well into 30K lines of quotes so more often than not it comes up blank. Is there any way to tie the output of $RANDOM to the number of lines in /etc/motd-msg?

 

[blobster21]

If you want to limit that to a certain maximum, you can just compare against the modulus of that maximum + 1.
For example, the following will yield results between 0 and 9:

echo $(($RANDOM %10))
5
echo $(($RANDOM %10))
9

source

 

[ypoora1]

If you want to limit that to a certain maximum, you can just compare against the modulus of that maximum + 1.
For example, the following will yield results between 0 and 9:

echo $(($RANDOM %10))
5
echo $(($RANDOM %10))
9

source

How do i go about integrating this onto my sed command? sorry, total noob at this.

 

[blobster21]

You could try to substitute your $RANDOM variable with the one provided before :

sed -n '$(($RANDOM %number_of_lines))p' /etc/motd-msg

don't forget to set %number_of_lines according to the real number of lines in your quotes file.

 

[ypoora1]

You could try to substitute your $RANDOM variable with the one provided before :

sed -n '$(($RANDOM %number_of_lines))p' /etc/motd-msg

don't forget to set %number_of_lines according to the real number of lines in your quotes file.

This does not work, i get "sed: -e expression #1, char 2: unknown command: `('". I guess i could always resort to writing a new quote in myself every day.

 

[blobster21]

Please disregard my previous post, try this one instead :

sed -n $((1+$RANDOM%`wc -l /etc/motd-msg | cut -f 1 -d ' '`))p /etc/motd-msg

I tested it successfully against a 70000+ word list and another tiny one, and got different words randomly choosen each time.

 

[ypoora1]

It prints "wc -l /etc/motd-msg | cut -f 1 -d ' '". is there something wrong with my MOTD? I have #!/bin/bash echo -e "text `command` " sorting, using /usr/local/bin/dynmotd.

 

[ypoora1]

It prints "wc -l /etc/motd-msg | cut -f 1 -d ' '". is there something wrong with my MOTD? I have #!/bin/bash echo -e "text `command` " sorting, using /usr/local/bin/dynmotd.

...nevermind. i need sleep.

 

[ypoora1]

..

...nevermind. i need sleep.

.or i don't need sleep and actually putting the word count in makes it print the same with 10 instead of wc.

 

[blobster21]

Hopefully you'll get it working the way you want

Feel free to share your ascii art here, i like that too.

 

[ypoora1]

Hopefully you'll get it working the way you want

Feel free to share your ascii art here, i like that too.

It looks like this so far. Pretty happy except for the quotes bit

 

[blobster21]

How about a simple

sort -R /etc/motd-msg | tail -1

After all, you're not married with sed

 

[ypoora1]

How about a simple


After all, you're not married with sed

Worked a treat. How it decides according to the number of lines is beyond me, but now anyone with permission can dump quotes to motd-msg and they will display randomly. Thanks ^^