On 1-Sep-2010, at 20:17, Macs R We wrote: > > On Sep 1, 2010, at 6:07 PM, LuKreme wrote: > >> Overall, I prefer mail.app and have taken the time to get around some of its >> limitations. For example, I don't like how mail.app handles signatures, so I >> wrote a script that uses fortune to generate a random signature for me out >> of a plain text fortune file. > > Share?
Sure. There's a couple of parts to it. First, you need to get fortune installed (I installed it originally via ports, but I keep the binaries for it in $HOME/bin/). Remember you will need the fortune executable and the strfile executable. Create your fortune file. I have mine up for easy stealing at http://home.kreme.com/mysigs.txt it's around a thousand entries to date culled from an eclectic field: some are comedians, some are geeks, some are philosophers, some are songs, some are movie quotes. Heck, some I made up myself. There's more than a fair lot of Discworld, fair warning. If you haven't worked with a fortune file, take a look at it, as the formatting is important and stfile will not work properly with a malformed file, and it won't give you an error either. Google 'man strfile' for details. Then you need to make the fortune data file using strfile. % ~/strfile /path/to/signatures I use a shell script and a launchagent to do the magic, they set a signature in Mail.app named "Fortune" ever few seconds to a random sig. You can change the interval of the launchagent to whatever you want if you want the signatures to change less often. I would very strongly recommend not going below 12 seconds, however. OS X does not like things that try to fire 'too often' and its definition of too often is 10 seconds, and it's a rather loose 10 seconds. 11 doesn't always work, 12 does. cerebus:~ kreme$ cat $HOME/bin/randsig #!/bin/bash SIGHOME="$HOME/.signature" $HOME/bin/fortune $HOME/mysigs > $SIGHOME MAIL=`ps -U"$USER" -co command | grep "\bMail\b"` # Don't bother setting mail's random sig if mail is not running for my user name if [ "$MAIL" ]; then # I did this as two steps as a troubleshooting step, then left it. # It seems something else I used wanted the escaped signature too cat $SIGHOME | sed -e 's/"/\\"/g' > $HOME/.mail_signature MYSIG="$(<$HOME/.mail_signature)" osascript <<EOF tell application "Mail" to set content of signature "Fortune" to "-- " & return & "$MYSIG" EOF fi This COULD be simpler, but I use $HOME/.signature for slrn as well. I tried to use it for ThunderBird, but it would only read the signature file once at launch. Then here's the launchagent that calls the above script: cerebus:~ kreme$ cat ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.kreme.home.randsig.plist <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd";> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>KeepAlive</key> <false/> <key>Label</key> <string>com.kreme.home.randsig</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/Users/kreme/bin/randsig</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> <key>StartInterval</key> <integer>12</integer> </dict> </plist> hnever you make edits to the mysig file, you have to rerun strfile or else it all goes pear shaped. -- "It's like those French have a different word for *everything*" - Steve Martin _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
