[sf-lug] boilerplate footers, etc. (was: much can be said for ...)

[Michael Paoli]

> From: "Akkana Peck" <akkana at shallowsky.com>
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] much can be said for ... for i in  
> /usr/share/man/man*; do man $i/*; done
> Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2016 20:49:34 -0600

> I suppose it's better than a 20-line warning that this is sent from
> a work email and everything therein is copyrighted and subject to
> legal action.
>
> My husband and I are on a mailing list where a lot of people used to
> have that tagline, and to make fun of it he started appending his
> own "Sent from" to every message. It started out as "Sent from
> Debian wheezy" or "Sent from a Dell Mini 9" but now he adjusts it
> for every message, like "Sent from just having returned from voting"
> or "Sent from a state of confusion" or "Sent from a major hailstorm".

Ah yes, I got quite annoyed at seeing the regular taggnig of email
from folks smartphones, tagged with "sent from my [tech du jour]" -
I really don't care, it didn't interest me, and it was annoying.

I was pleasantly amused when I saw someone put a tagline on,
something like:
Sent from my Teletype ASR-33
... or something like that (was probably even on this list).

> Some of the people got the point and I don't see a lot of "Sent from
> iPhone", but there's still some -- I just checked recent messages
> and someone had a "Sent from my iPhone 6" in reply to his "sent from
> my phalanges." Oh, well.

> and I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to do that,
> particularly people who don't enjoy writing.

Yeah, ... I'm not too keen on writing in English - was always
my worst subject in school.  I generally quite prefer writing in Perl,
or some other programming language.

> Sent from Debian, mutt, vim and a chorus of cicadas

So, ... fun with footers ... of course this stuff has been going on
for a *long* time.

Here's a repost of one I wrote about at least once before - but
can't presently find it on-line anywhere:

"almost" original UNIX humor ...

Okay, just thought I'd share (searching the Internet, I find very few
references to this, so perhaps it's never "made the rounds" in
(non-ancient) history).

Once upon a time, ... back in 1997, I was "converting" my home UNIX
system to (Debian GNU/)Linux.  In the process, I poured over and sorted
out what to save, and what to trash from the preceeding (SCO) UNIX
system (some of which had been carried over from my original SCO XENIX
2.3.2 installation).  Going through various files, I stumbled across and
made note of this little gem.  In the file:
/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.scover
I found:
.if \\n(.$<=6 The information contained herein is for the use of  
employees of Bell Laboratories and is not for publication.  (See GEI  
13.9-3)\p
.if \\n(.$>6 Warning: studying this document may cause drowsiness.  Do  
not read before driving or operating machinery.  (See GEI 13.9-3)\p

For those that may not know what it is, and what it does ... this is
part of the original UNIX Text Processing System (nroff, troff, and
friends).  It also includes many of packaged macros, ... several of which
were never really intended for use outside of Bell Laboratories, but
were nevertheless included.  Well, anyway, that particular little bit in
that Bell Laboratories Technical Memorandum macro package, made a subtle
change in the boilerplate text on pages after the 6th page.

references/excerpts:
Unix Seventh Edition
http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/tmac.scover
SCO XENIX (V 2.3.2) Text Processing System (or whatever it was packaged as)
/usr/lib/tmac/tmac.scover

echo '.nr n 9
echo '.nr n( 9
echo '.nr n(. 9
echo '.nr n(.$ 9
echo '.nr ( 9
echo '.nr (.$ 9
echo '.nr (.$ 9
echo '.nr .$ 9
echo '.nr . 9
echo '.nr $ 9
.CS' | nroff -mscover | fgrep G


for tmp in 'n' 'n(' 'n(.' 'n(.$' '(' '(.$' '(.$' '.$' '.' '$'
do
echo ".nr $tmp 9
.CS" | nroff -mscover | fgrep G
done