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.