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From: israel@brillig.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Suppressing the message of the day.
Message-ID: <6720@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-May-87 01:25:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: mimsy.6720
Posted: Sun May 17 01:25:34 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 17-May-87 09:01:19 EDT
References: <15452@brunix.UUCP> <1506@uwmacc.UUCP> <1100@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@mimsy.UUCP
Reply-To: israel@brillig.UUCP (Bruce Israel)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science,
Lines: 49

In article <1100@sigi.Colorado.EDU> forys@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jeff Forys) writes:
>> In article <15452@brunix.UUCP> kbb@brunix.UUCP (Karl Berry.) wonders:
>> > Is it possible to suppress the printing of the message of the day
>
>					  If you want "/etc/motd" displayed
>only when the contents change, you might use something like:
>
>	cmp -s .hushlogin /etc/motd
>	if ( $status ) then
>		cat /etc/motd | tee .hushlogin
>	endif

The problem with this is that first, here at our site we have a crontab
daemon that puts a greeting into the motd based on the time of day,
changing it every six hours, and second, when someone adds a new couple of
lines to the motd, I don't really want to see the parts of it that have
been around for the last couple of days.

What I did was to write the following shell script, called motdprint, that
I call from my .login.  What this shell script does is to print whatever's
been added to the motd.  You'll also see an 'egrep -v' that removes the
spurious greeting line.  Enjoy.

#! /bin/csh -f
#
# motdprint - print the changed versions of the MOTD
#	- BNI 8/18/86
#
# This script prints /etc/motd if it has been changed since the last
# time it was printed.  If it was changed, it will only print out any
# new lines, i.e. lines that were added only, not any lines that it
# would've printed out previously.
#
cd
touch .hushlogin
egrep -v 'Good morning\!|Good afternoon\!|Good evening\!|What are you doing on at this time of night?' </etc/motd >/tmp/motd.$$
cmp -s /tmp/motd.$$ .hushlogin
if (${status} != 0) then
	diff .hushlogin /tmp/motd.$$ | grep '^>' | sed -e 's/^>//'
	cp /tmp/motd.$$ .hushlogin
endif
rm -f /tmp/motd.$$

--

Bruce Israel

University of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
seismo!mimsy!israel (Usenet)    israel@mimsy.umd.edu (Internet)