Here's something I've wanted for a long time now, and was too lazy to write one - a script that adds random dinosaur descriptions as your signature to thunderbird mail.
Before you go on to accuse me of blasphemy for not using perl, here's the reason - I didn't want to. Why perl when you can bash :D
1. Get the list of dinosaurs from wikipedia.
bash $ wget -o /tmp/dinolist.txt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dinosaurs;2. Strip off html tags
bash $ cat /tmp/dinolist/.txt | grep "<li> < i> < a href="%5C%22/wiki/%22" | cut -d"\"" -f 2 | cut -d"/" -f 3 | tee dinosaurlist.txt3. Generate the signature
bash $ vim gen_signature.sh#!/bin/bashcount=`cat dinosaurlist.txt | wc -l`random=$RANDOMlet dinonum=$RANDOM%countxyz=(`cat dinosaurlist.txt`)dinoname=${xyz[$dinonum]}echo $dinonamelynx --dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/${dinoname} | egrep -A 20 "\[[0-9]*\]Binomial name" | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g' > "/home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt"text=`cat /home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt`if [ -z "$text" ]then lynx --dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/${dinoname} | egrep -A 20 "\[[0-9]*\]Species" | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g' > "/home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt"fi4. Change the signature once every five minutes.
bash $ cat /etc/crontabSHELL=/bin/bashPATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/binMAILTO=rootHOME=/# run-parts*/5 * * * * ishwar /home/ishwar/.thunderbird/gen_signature.shAccepted, this is not the most elegant script. But it makes me happy.