Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#76 Displaying Random Text

The built-in server-side include features offer some wonderful ways to expand and extend your website. One way that's a favorite with many webmasters is the ability to have an element of a web page change each time the page is loaded. The ever-changing element might be a graphic, a news snippet, or a featured subpage, or it might just be a tag line for the site itself, but one that's slightly different for each visit to keep the reader interested and — hopefully — coming back for more.

What's remarkable is that this trick is quite easy to accomplish with a shell script containing an awk program only a few lines long, invoked from within a web page via an SSI include (see Script #75 for an example of SSI directive ...