Put ASCII Art in Your MOTD ~ Bauer-Power Media

Apr 28, 2010

Put ASCII Art in Your MOTD

1:00 AM

Paul B

I once wrote about this for AskTheAdmin, and thought that perhaps I should write a little something about it here too. Mainly because I recently did this at work when I setup a new osTicket system running on Ubuntu 10.04 server.

You see, when you have to do work on Linux servers all day, after a while the geekiness of the terminal can get to you, so you have to do something to liven things up a bit. What do I do? I add a little ASCII art to my MOTD. For those that don’t speak geek, MOTD stands for “Message of The Day” and it is the first thing you see when you log into a Linux/Unix server. Admins can put important messages like maintenance windows, downtime, etc. I like to put silly pictures.

Here is an example of my work:

Nice right? You can get plenty of ASCII images just by doing a quick Google search. I got the one above from Ascii-Art.de. To add the art to your server all you have to do is edit the /etc/motd.tail file with your favorite text editor.