Re: [Pan-users] Re: Shortcuts gone?

[Christophe Lambin]

On Fri, 18 Aug, 2006 at 00:18 +0200, Brad Sims wrote:
> Yeah I know about as elegant as a Russian sledgehammer; but it works
> and was the first script I ever wrote.

Well, since you posted it, I can't resist reviewing it. :)

> b=`ls ~/.sigs | wc -w`
> RANGE=$b
> number=$RANDOM
> let "number %= $RANGE"

So, your sig files are named sig001, sig002, ... sig<nnn>, right ?
Since you're modding the count, number is now 0 ... n-1.

You would reuse b (i.e. let number %= $b). You also don't need the
quotes (I think; any reason why you added them?).

> if [ $number = "0" ]
>         then
>         number=1
>         else
>         number=$number
> fi

You actually need to do:
        let number+=1 
(or you'll never use the last one).

> # this makes sure that it reads the right file,
> #  ie: sig001 not sig1.

The whole section doing this be done as USEME=`printf "%03d" $number. :)

Personally, I'd write:
        
        # index all the files
        let count=0
        for d in `ls ~/.sigs`; do
                file[$count]="$d"
                let count+=1
        done
        # file is now an array of filenames, count the number of files
        # pick a file
        index=$(($RANDOM%$count))
        # Output the file
        cat ${file[$index]}

This way, your code doesn't make any assumptions on the filenames within
your .sigs directory.

> # This puts the random sig in a file named .slrnsig in the News directory
> # and moves the old sig into a file named .slrnsig.old in case you want to
> # use it instead.

If you'd only need something for Pan, you could just let the script cat
the file, and let Pan call the script.

Regards,
Christophe

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