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Occasional quotes and motivational messages sometimes give me a little boost, so I thought I’d tweak my shell to display a random message for the first terminal session of the day.

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/etc/motd

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Hard-coding something in /etc/motd would irritate me: it’d be the same message displayed again and again, in every terminal session. (Well actually it’d only be login sessions, but that seems to be most interactive session across for me.)

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(Side-note: you can silence the login process by creating a ~/.hushlogin file. i.e. touch ~/.hushlogin will suppress /etc/motd content in any/all login shells.)

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/etc/update-motd.d/

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A step up from a static /etc/motd file: Ubuntu and Debian support dynamic motd fragments, assembling a message from output of any number of executables in the /etc/update-motd.d/ folder. I might have taken this approach if I was running an appropriate OS, but think it would still suffer from the same problem of displaying the message in every shell window.

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(Side-note: the executables in /etc/update-motd.d/ run in lexixcal sort order; it’s common practice to give the executables numeric prefixes: e.g. 10-weather would run before 99-scheduled-downtime)

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Simplified Requirements

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I want:

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  1. a repository of motiviational messages
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  2. a record of the last time a message was displayed (any message)
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To keep things simple I’ll keep all the messages in a plain-text file, and use the last-modified timestamp of a sentinel file to record the ‘last displayed’ time.

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Stealing content

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I intend to carefully curate quotes that resonate with me, but for expediency I’ll grab some quotes in bulk from a couple of random articles.

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(I’m including these details as an example of extracting information direct from the DOM using Chrome’s devtools.)

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First up: 17 Motivational Quotes to Inspire You to Be Successful

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To extract the quotes I browsed the site in Chrome, opened devtools and used the Elements to check the structure of the page to identify container and structural elements used in the markup, then ran a snippet of code in the Console tab to get all the content into the clipboard.

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In this particular case all quotes were marked up as h3 elements. I copied all the h3 text content to the clipboard:

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copy(\n  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("h3"))\n    .map(({ textContent }) => textContent)\n    .join("\\n")\n);
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I used the CLI to filter out empty-lines (using awk), unwanted extra headings (using head) and stripped off an unwanted number. prefix from every quote (using awk again)

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# Ensure ~/.config/motd folder exists:\nmkdir -p ~/.config/motd\n\n# Filter the clipboard data and append to the given file (the file will be created if it doesn't already exist.)\npbpaste | awk NF | head -17 | awk '{ sub(/^[^ ]+ /, "") } 1' >> ~/.config/motd/messages
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On reflection: shell commands were the wrong tool for the job. As we’re grabbing content from the web browser, we’d be better off doing the filtering and manipulation before copying the content to the clipboard:

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// Grab all quotes (and some unwanted noise)\nquotes = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("h3")).map(({ textContent }) => textContent);\n\n// After inspecting results and trying various things in console, we quickly arrive at:\ncopy(\n  quotes\n    .filter(Boolean) // removes empty strings\n    .slice(0, 17) // only use content from the first 17 (non-empty) headings\n    .map((quote) => quote.replace(/.*? /, "")) // strip off unwanted prefix\n    .join("\\n")\n);
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Second source: 300 Motivational Quotes To Inspire You Today.

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quotes = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".single-post ol>li")).map(\n  ({ textContent }) => textContent\n);\n\n// After inspection, we believe all the content is clean, so no addigional filtering/processing required:\ncopy(quotes.join("\\n"));
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pbpaste >> ~/.config/motd/messages
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The script

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#!/bin/bash\n\nCONFIG_DIR=~/.config/motd\nMESSAGES="${CONFIG_DIR}/messages"\nMESSAGES_LAST_DISPLAY="${MESSAGES}-last-display"\n\nif [ ! -f "$MESSAGES" ]; then\n  echo "$0: Store messages in '${MESSAGES}' (file does not exist)"\n  exit 1\nfi\n\nif [ ! -s "$MESSAGES" ]; then\n  echo "$0: Cannot find any messages in '${MESSAGES}'"\n  exit 1\nfi\n\nif [ ! -r "$MESSAGES" ]; then\n  echo "$0: Cannot read messages from '${MESSAGES}' (file is not readable)"\n  exit 1\nfi\n\nif [ -f "$MESSAGES_LAST_DISPLAY" ]; then\n  TODAY=$(date +%F)\n  LAST_DATE_DISPLAYED=$(date -r "$MESSAGES_LAST_DISPLAY" +%F)\n  if [ "$TODAY" == "$LAST_DATE_DISPLAYED" ]; then\n    # We already displayed a message today\n    # (One motivational message a day is enough)\n    exit 0\n  fi\nfi\n\n# Get a random message from the file:\nMESSAGE=$(shuf -n 1 "$MESSAGES" 2> /dev/null)\n\nif [ -z "$MESSAGE" ]; then\n  echo "$0: Empty message (blank line) found in '${MESSAGES}'"\n  exit 1\nfi\n\n# Using \\033 instead of \\e for escape codes as \\e wasn't working in iTerm on macOS\necho -e "\\033[38;5;81m${MESSAGE}\\033[m"\n\n# Create file or update its last-modified-time (mtime):\ntouch "$MESSAGES_LAST_DISPLAY" &> /dev/null
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Also available as a gist

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I called the script motd and stored it in ~/bin (which is in my PATH.)

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As I reuse a ~/.bash_profile between machines, I check whether the motd command exists before trying to execute it:

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# Run our motd command if-and-only-if it exists:\ncommand -v motd &> /dev/null && motd
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Tidbits

\n\n","timeToRead":5,"frontmatter":{"title":"Motivational MOTD","blurb":"A small shell-script to output a motivational message-of-the-day - only once a day","date":"2020-11-11T18:50:07.471Z","modified":null}}},"pageContext":{"slug":"/blog/motd/","next":{"fields":{"slug":"/blog/run-jsx-from-command-line/"},"frontmatter":{"title":"Running .jsx from the command-line"}},"previous":{"fields":{"slug":"/blog/2009/12/03/javascript-date-to-time/"},"frontmatter":{"title":"JavaScript Date to Time"}}}},"staticQueryHashes":["1192980692"]}