I was setting up my signature file (~/.sig) in Thunderbird today, and I thought to myself, “hmm, let me create a fifo instead, and pipe some output from fortune into it”. So I mkfifo’‘ed ~/.sig and wrote a little perl script to write out my signature into the fifo when Thunderbird asked for it. The script is pretty simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

chdir; $FIFO = ‘‘.sig’’;

while (1) { unless (-p $FIFO) { unlink $FIFO; system(‘‘mknod’’, $FIFO, ‘‘p’’) && die “can’‘t mknod $FIFO: $!”; }

# next line blocks until 
# there''s a reader
open (FIFO, "> $FIFO") 
|| die "can''t write $FIFO: $!";
print FIFO <<EOF -- HMB. (hisham.mardambey\@gmail.com) Codito Ergo Sum.

EOF ; print FIFO fortune, “\n”; close FIFO; sleep 5; # to avoid dup signals }

The result of which will be:

– HMB. (hisham.mardambey@gmail.com) Codito Ergo Sum.

Guy in chicken costume: The world is gonna end at midnight tonight. Y2K. Peter Griffin: Y2K? What are you selling, chicken or sex jelly?

And to my amazement, as soon as I fired up Thunderbird and tried to compose a new email, the entire user interface blocked, and my CPU usage went through the roof. A quick check showed that Thunderbird was infinitely reading from the fifo. Son of a … After some google’ing around, I found this to be a common bug in the 2.x.x series, so I upgraded to 3.x.x, and, they had introduced a “fix”. What sort of fix might you ask? Well, I could compose a message alright, except the ~/.sig file wouldn’t get read at all. What a fix! If the file is a fifo don’t read it? Thats hilarious. At this point, I was fed up, Thunderbird was going away. I remembered another mail client I used to use, Claws. A quick call to emerge installed it, and 2 minutes later, I had it all set up and it was reading my ~/.sig file properly. Claws 1, Thunderbird 0.