Finger your own adventure
=========================
Last night I had a funny idea, what if I could play a Choose Your Own
Adventure game via finger?
After some searches I was able to find a plain-text version of a CYOA
book. I just had to define how the game would be playable. I though of
splitting the book in files, one per page and use a regular expression
to route the finger query to the correct page.
The finger server on my server is efingerd[0], when editing its list
file I noticed the #!/bin/sh shebang. I know the bash shell supports
regular expressions so in my '/etc/efingerd/nouser' file I changed the
shebang to #!/bin/bash and added:
if [[ "$3" =~ ^[0-9]{1,3}$ ]]; then
if [ -e /var/finger/cyoa/$3 ]; then
cat /var/finger/cyoa/$3
exit 0
fi
fi
I match $3 (the user/service name you try to finger) againt a 1 to 3
digits regular expression and then check if a file with that name
exists. And that's it! I have some nice "dynamic" routing to the
proper book page.
You can try it here[1].
Hope you like it!
Tags: #finger #cyoa #game
[0]
https://korpus.sk/~garabik/software/efingerd.html
[1] finger
[email protected]
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Last update: 24 January, 2019
