[plug] Linux uptime

[Bernard]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 11:09:51AM +0800, Patrick Tehvand wrote:
> I am currently using a combination of elm and pine (depending on what i
> want to do) and shoutlook when using windoze (which is pretty much all
> the time @work)
> 
> not using a linux desktop as I had a lot of trouble integrating with the
> other users @work. I tried it for two weeks and it ended up taking too
> much time. If the whole office went linux it wouldnt be a prob... such
> is life i guess.
> 
> any thing for elm or pine would be good.

Patrick,

I haven't done this recently, but I believe it goes something along
the lines of:

0) rm ~/.signature
1) mkfifo ~/.signature
2) make a perl or bash or whatever you prefer script to dump stuff
   in it continually. eg:

#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 ] ; do
( echo "-- " ; uptime ) > ~/.signature
done &

   call it whatever you like (eg, bin/sig.sh)

3) execute it once (and once only) every time you start up.
4) pine or elm should read your .signature on composing a mail
   message.


A neater alternative I've seen done is to put a line in inittab
(root access required of course) and I recall the line goes like:

sig:2345:respawn:/home/bernard/bin/mysignature

where the script /home/bernard/bin/mysignature just throws whatever
you like into your .signature file once. And then init will respawn
it for next time. Remember to run "init q" (as root) to tell it to
re-read inittab. And because it runs as root all paths should
probably be absolute in your script.

This should work for all mail programs theoretically.

HTH,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au