Personalize your terminal greeting
Ivan | Mon, 2004-08-09 14:46Want to be über cool? You can have a personalized greeting for your terminal sessions.
- Open Terminal and get root access by typing in:
su - Enter your password.
- Now you will open a Terminal word processor to modify the default greeting:
pico /etc/motd - Delete the default and type in your message. It can be several lines. Even an ASCII art.
- Press CTRL-X, than "Y" and enter to quit and save.
- Press Apple (or otherwise known as Commmand)-N to open a new window and see the result of your hack.
If you are regular reader you already know how to manipulate your images in Terminal and how to browse the net using links. Soon you will officially graduate as a certified OS X geek.
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Hm, I never considered posting something about this. I sought out the MOTD a couple weeks ago to change mine to 'Welcome to Michael's MotherF***ing Macintosh. Kthx have fun.'
what did that poor Mac did to you to call it names? :)
you're certainly geeker than me, 'cos I need an acronym finder to decipher your post. ;)
Some more info from a UNIX geek,
If you want to personalize 'your' greeting, instead of what everybody sees, you should modify your .login file (which can do a lot of other things besides greet you). This has the added benefit of not requiring you to use su because it only affects you.
The easiest way to add a statement like Hi Bob! every time you login is to use the echo command. For example, I would add this line into my .login file:
echo Hi Bob!
And I would see that message every time I logged in. If you don't see a .login file in your home directory, you can create it (don't forget the . or it won't work). For more information on other things you can do to customize Terminal and TCSH (OS X's default 'shell') you can type man tcsh or buy the book on Customizing CSH/TCSH from O'Reilly.
~OnALark