Fun Using Banner To Send Subliminal Messages In Cygwin Linux

Greetings, once again,

Here's a good "Lazy Sunday Post" in the same vein as previous posts on using color in the shell and the like. Much like a psychic reading, this post is for entertainment purposes only ;)

Today, I put together a little no-variable script (from which a real script could easily grow) using the "banner" command in Cygwin Linux. It's very simple to use and takes no arguments at all. You can execute it simply, like this:

hot # ./subanner <--- If there were arguments they might be "what your banner says" and "what you really mean" ;)

I didn't bother putting in any error checking, either, since this is just for a goof and doesn't take any variables. This works well on any implementation of the "banner" command that accepts the -c flag to indicate what character the banner should be printed out with. If your distro of Unix or Linux doesn't have this capability, Perl has a Text::Banner module that can do the same thing.

Hope you have fun mucking with this (make it your own. We all have something unique to say ;) and, at the same time, let users that log on to your machines know what you really think :)

p.s. If anyone knows how to strip the ending \012 off of banner output (And I've tried octal dump, sed, awk, tr, hex and octal codes, Perl, etc), please email me - it's making me nuts ;) Therefore, this banner is vertical rather than horizontal.

Maybe if it wasn't the weekend my brain would be in better shape to tackle this issue ;)

Cheers,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/bin/bash

#
# subanner - subliminal banner :)
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
#

message="Be Kind"
meaning="Go Away"

count=0

while [ $count -lt ${#message} ]
do
        banner -c "${meaning:$count:1}" "${message:$count:1}"
        let count=$count+1
done

, Mike

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