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Greet users with the message of the day

Clarice Bouwer

Software Engineering Team Lead and Director of Cloudsure

Friday, 15 February 2019 · Estimated 1 minute read

The message of the day is known as motd. It's used to send a message to users after logging into a shell, commonly used on hosts.

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find / -name "motd" # if you forget where to locate the file
vim /etc/motd

You can generate ASCII art and paste it into the motd file to spice things up.

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   __                  _                  __
  / /   ___ _   _ _ __(_) ___  _   _ ___  \ \
 | |   / __| | | | '__| |/ _ \| | | / __|  | |
< <   | (__| |_| | |  | | (_) | |_| \__ \   > >
 | |   \___|\__,_|_|  |_|\___/ \__,_|___/  | |
  \_\                                     /_/

I found that patorjk.com offers a nice way to generate ascii art.