Comments on: clear >> /etc/issue

By: Painting with cadubi « Motho ke motho ka botho

Painting with cadubi « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:30:22 +0000

[...] written back out again, you can tack it on to your /etc/issue file, in a manner somewhat similar to this, and make your logins quite [...]

By: Kaleb Elwert

Kaleb Elwert — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:07:45 +0000

Same issue in Gentoo.

I love this file, though:
/etc/bash/bash_logout

That’s where it is in Gentoo at least. I just add “clear” to the end and it works like a charm.

By: Eirik

Eirik — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:54:47 +0000

Hm,

I probably should have used “tempfile”, this being a public post:

tf=$(tempfile); (clear; cat /etc/issue) > $tf; mv $tf /etc/issue

Maybe the next generation of Linux users won’t all be using insecure temporary files[1] now…

-e

[1]http://www.google.com/search?q=temporary+file+bug

By: Eirik

Eirik — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:23:44 +0000

Hm,

for those that don’t have a completely empty /etc/issue, you might want to do the reverse, namely append clear to the top of /etc/issue.

I couldn’t find any reasonable way append to the beginning of a file using only the shell, so:

(clear; cat /etc/issue) > /tmp/issue; mv /tmp/issue /etc/issue

#Parenthesis needed to execute both clear, and cat in subshell,
#and for single redirect to work. Equivalent to:
clear >> /tmp/issue
cat /etc/issue >> /tmp/issue
mv /tmp/issue /etc/issue

Using perl one could easily read the whole file, effectively using an anonymous buffer in ram as the temporary file.

-e

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:38:12 +0000

I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, that would be cool too.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:37:46 +0000

If you do, please leave a link. I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:37:18 +0000

Ah, that was supposed to be my own little joke. So much for being clever.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:36:48 +0000

Interesting. Not exactly my style, but I could see adjusting it to suit me.

By: ShiftPlusOne

ShiftPlusOne — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:15:50 +0000

Nice! You could also use img2txt, which I think comes with libcaca, to customize /etc/issue.

By: Colin Jones

Colin Jones — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:30:29 +0000

I actually do go overboard and put a pixel art image in my issue along with the name of the computer it’s for.
It makes a great alternative to GDM or even Slim and Quingy.

I was planning on writing a tutorial on how to do this too.