Are you bored of having just one signature? Would you relish the ability to have a flashy, random signature, like all your friends? But, perhaps, your email or news software will only let you select one paltry, boring file as your signature. And so, you think, "Damn, I'm stuck with one signature." But you'ld be wrong to think that - because, you see, AutoSig allows one file to represent a myriad of signatures - every time that file is opened, you get a different, randomly choosen signature from your collection. AutoSig is written in Bourne Shell scripts, so should work on any *nix system that supports FIFO's or named pipes (and that's most of them). Download a GNU zip compressed tar file here. The download contains the autosig programs and this documentation.
First download the tar file, and decompress it, like this -tar -xvzf autosig.tgz. You will then have a copy of AutoSig in a subdirectory called autosig. You can either add this directory to your path, copy the executables in the directory to a directory that is already in your path, or just type the complete path to the programs when you want to run them. Now, you need to configure AutoSig.
AutoSig is configured by means of environment variables. You can set these in the .profile file in your home directory, by adding a line like this:
export variable=value
For example, to set the file that your signatures are stored in to MySignatures, add this line:
export SIGNATURES=MySignatures
Here is a list of all the variables you can set, along with their default values, which will be used unless you set others.
| Variable | Meaning | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| FORTUNE | The command line you type to execute your fortune program | /usr/games/fortune |
| SIGFILE | The file that autosig will output signatures to. You should set your email and news programs to use whatever file you specify here as your signature - it should not exist before you first run autosig | ~/.autosig |
| SIGNATURES | The file that contains all your signatures. Signatures can be added to this file by means of the addsig program. This filename cannot start with a dot. | ~/signatures |
| SIGTEMPLATE | If this file exists, then this is used as a template for all your signatures - when you add a new signature, you will be presented with a copy of this file to edit, rather that a blank file. | ~/.sigtemplate |
| EDITOR | This is the program that will be used to edit signatures. | The default will be specified by your system administrator - if they haven't set it, then /bin/vi will be used. |
To use AutoSig, you need to configure your email software to use, as your signature file, the file you specified as SIGFILE, which is .autosig in your home directory unless you set it otherwise. Then add some signatures, and run autosig. To ensure that autosig is always working when you want it to be, you could consider running it in your .profile. If you do, you should do it with the following code to ensure that AutoSig doesn't get run twice:
if [ "(`ps x | grep autosig | grep -v grep`)" = "()" ]; then
autosig &
fi
To add signatures, you use the addsig program. This will present you with a template (probably blank) signature to edit. If you edit this and quit the editor, then this file will be added to the signature list, and will start to be used next time you use your signature file. If you do not save any changes to the file, then no new signature will be added.
To test that AutoSig is working properly, you can run cat ~/.autosig. One of your signatures should be printed on the screen.