Bash poem echo

.haiku.cfg

function unsetvars {
        unset word
        unset poem
	unset poems
        unset line
}


function getpoem {
        
	#get number of lines in file
        counter=`wc -l < $poems`

        #get random line number
        NUMBER=$[ ( $RANDOM % $counter )  + 1 ] 

        #get the line
        poem=`sed -n "${NUMBER}p" < $poems`

}


function echopoem {

        echo 

        #go through each word
        for word in $poem; do

                #if the word isn't a newline character, add it to the output
                if [ "${word}" == "/" ];
                then
                        echo $line;
                        unset line;
                else
                        line=$line" ${word}";
                fi
        done

        echo $line;

        echo
}

function printhaiku {
        unsetvars
	poems=$1
        getpoem
        echopoem
        unsetvars
}

Readme

A simple bash function to display a poem. 

Pull the function from the .cfg into your .bash_profile by adding this line:

. ~/.haiku.cfg

Poems are to be stored in a textfile with one line per poem. A forward slash indicated a new line e.g.

This is line 1 of the first poem / This is line 2 of the first poem
This is line 1 of the second poem / This is line 2 of the second poem

The bash function grabs a random poem and echoes it out line-by-line.

The function is called 'printhaiku', it takes one parameter: the poem file. 

In my .bash_profile I have put the following line to display a poem every time I open a new shell:

printhaiku './haiku.txt'