Nice, thanks for the info about xmlstarlet, I hadn’t heard of it. I’ve tested on an Ubuntu 10.04 and that is the distro with /etc/update-motd.d dir. I’m not sure which other distros include that but it can be placed whereever.

xmlstarlet was not installed for me, but was available via apt-get in the default sources. It did not provide ‘xml’ to me but you could easily link it to xmlstarlet.

You are right /etc/ is not the best place for this; probably /usr/local/scripts/ or similar. I use /etc/ since I back all of those files up. :)

This is xmlstarlet in action. I was just wondering which distro are you using? I don’t have /etc/update-motd.d, and you do have /etc/scripts or you made this dir? /etc is not really good place for this…

I did stumble across fortune, which was unfamiliar to me (despite its long-term existence!), but I wanted to grab it from an online source so that I didn’t have to manage a database of quotations. My thinking is that they would be more varied than a source that I self-select. Thanks for the tip!