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I was recently reminded of textfiles.com existence via a gopher mirror.
This gave me a silly idea, how about adding a random textfile from textfiles.com to the finger space?
This was relatively easy as textfiles.com provides zip files for all of its categories. I downloaded them, cleaned up the pictures and html files I didn't want to display and uploaded these files to my finger server.
In the process I learned two neat little shell tricks.
First I wanted to get a random files from a directory structure, a quick search engine lookup made me aware of the `shuf` command which I didn't knew.
Getting a random file looks like:
find /var/finger/textfiles -type f | shuf -n 1
Pretty cool!
When returning the content I added a small header with the path to the file. This path mimicks the one on the web version of textfiles.com. The only issue is that I wanted to remove the `/var/finger` part. I initially tried with awk but then stubbled upon a much nicer solution in:
file=$(find /var/finger/textfiles -type f | shuf -n 1)
echo -e "\nRandom Textfile: ${file#/var/finger/}\n"
The `file#/var/finger/` part will remove `/var/finger/` from file thanks to POSIX shell variable expansion. As seen here:
That's it! I learned two shell tricks doing this funny finger experiment, very happy I tried it!
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