Motd is a hilariously over-engineered utility to deliver a single quote ("motto-of-the-day", hence the name) per invocation, picked at random from a pool of predefined messages.
The roots of this code reach way back to the early nineties, when it had to run on an excruciatingly slow machine using a random number generator with notoriously abysmal distribution. To be honest, a half decent replacement could probably be written in a few lines of shell or awk script.
Think of it as a fun proof-of-concept project way past its expiration date, that I nonetheless kept up-to-date and over the decades ported to whatever platform I was using at the time. While its usefulness is debatable, some of the quotes are still quite entertaining.
Run make
. You may then edit the generated config.h
file to match
your tastes and rebuild with the modified settings.
Put the motd binary wherever you see fit. Running motd -h
displays a
short help text that will give you an idea of how to invoke it and where
to place the quotes file. Enjoy!
The experimental gotd server allows to fetch a motto over TCP or UDP
simply by connecting to the configured port (1717 by default). Running
gotd -h
shows a short help message outlining the available command
line options.
Motd is distributed under the Modified ("3-clause") BSD License. See
LICENSE
file for more information.