Perl Cookbook

Program: sigrand

Description

The following program gives you random signatures by using named pipes. It expects the signatures file to have records in the format of the fortune program—that is, each possible multiline record is terminated with "%%\n". Here’s an example:

Make is like Pascal: everybody likes it, so they go in and change it.
                                            --Dennis Ritchie
%%
I eschew embedded capital letters in names; to my prose-oriented eyes,
they are too awkward to read comfortably. They jangle like bad typography.
                                            --Rob Pike
%%
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.  
                                            --Kronecker
%%
I'd rather have :rofix than const.          --Dennis Ritchie
%%
If you want to program in C, program in C.  It's a nice language.
I use it occasionally...   :-)              --Larry Wall
%%
Twisted cleverness is my only skill as a programmer.       
                                            --Elizabeth Zwicky
%%
Basically, avoid comments. If your code needs a comment to be understood,
it would be better to rewrite it so it's easier to understand.  
                                            --Rob Pike
%%
Comments on data are usually much more helpful than on algorithms.  
                                            --Rob Pike
%% 
Programs that write programs are the happiest programs in the world.
                                            --Andrew Hume 
%%

We check whether we’re already running by using a file with our PID in it. If sending a signal number indicates that PID still exists (or, rarely, that something else has reused it), we just exit. We also look at the current Usenet posting to decide whether to look for a per-newsgroup signature file. That way, you can have different signatures for each ...