Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Add a "Message Of The Day" to Terminal.

This one is super simple and can be done in both Tiger and Leopard. I was curious how to do this because I wanted to add the "Welcome to Darwin!" that I missed so much from Tiger's Terminal.

To add a Message of the Day:

1.) Open Terminal and enter the following command.

sudo vim /etc/motd

Since we are not logged into the Root User, we have to precede the command with a sudo, this then prompts you, asking for your administrative password.

(Also Note: that you can use any editor of your choice, now that I know a few of the shortcuts for vim, it is starting to grow on me. "Nano" is also a very easy Text Editor, and the shortcuts are all displayed at the bottom of the screen for your convenience.)

2.) Once you have entered vim, press "i" to enter the "Input mode" and type whatever you'd like for your message of the day. Example: "Welcome to Darwin!"

3.) Push Esc to exit out of "Input mode" and type: ":wq" (explained in this post) to save the file.

4.) Now close and re-open Terminal and you'll now see your new Message of the Day!

1 comment:

hartzd said...

now you can use figlet/cowsay to make fun motd with color!

those two projects are very cool/simple, I recommend looking into them...