FIST(1)FIST(1)NAMEfist - emphatic message generator
SYNOPSISfist [ -c -fpat -l -mtext -n -sfactor -u ]
DESCRIPTIONfist prints an image of a clenched fist (unless suppressed by the -c
option), followed by a slogan in block letters, limited to 16 charac‐
ters per line (``Television is to news as bumper stickers are to phi‐
losophy.''-Richard M. Nixon). Options permit you to scale the fist
commensurate to the iniquities of the Oppressor (or your printer's
paper size, whichever is smaller), select right- or left-handed blows
against the Empire, and various other gimmicks which popped into the
mind of this Humble Programmer while watching "Ice Station Zebra" over
and over again and watching his fingernails grow. Oops...that was
another megalomaniac. Anyway, here's the latest incarnation of the
fist program. May your banners ever espouse worthy causes, and may
those truly worthy be achieved.
OPTIONS-c Chill out: no fist is generated, only the message text.
-fpat Fill the fist with the text pattern pat, which may be any
string of ASCII/ISO characters. If the pattern contains
blanks or characters interpreted by the shell, it should be
quoted or escaped appropriately.
-l The fist will be left handed.
-mtext Supply a line of the text to be printed below the fist on the
command line. If the text contains blank or shell metachar‐
acters it should be quoted or escaped. Only the first 16
characters of the text will be printed. You may supply mul‐
tiple -m options for multi-line text. Note that you must
also specify the -n option if you don't want fist to read
additional lines of text from standard input after printing
lines supplied by the -m option.
-n Do not read text to be printed below the fist from standard
input. Unless you've specified text with one or more -m
options, no text at all will be printed, just the fist. If
you specify only the -c and -n options, the only consequence
of running fist will be the passage of time.
-sfactor Scale the fist by the given percentage factor between 25 and
100.
-u Print how to call information.
FILES
Lines of text (limited to 16 characters) are read from standard input
unless suppressed by the -n option; these lines are printed in block
letters below the fist. Input from standard input is terminated by an
end of file. Output is written to standard output. Input and output
are processed strictly sequentially and hence fist may be used in pipe‐
lines.
BUGS
The block character font is a limited subset of ASCII containing only
upper case letters, numbers, and punctuation with character codes
between hexadecimal 20 and 5F. The font was originally created in the
late 1960's in UNIVAC 1108 six bit FIELDATA code, and re-shuffled into
ASCII order when the first port was made to an ASCII machine in 1981.
If you'd like to add lower case letters, ISO codes, or full Unicode, go
right ahead.
fist will not work on machines which do not use the ASCII character
code (for example EBCDIC machines). You'll need to shuffle the font
table or translate character codes to ASCII before you index it. I
don't have such a machine, so I'm not going to include code I can't
test.
Scale factors smaller than about 60 on the -s option produce infelici‐
tous results: the fist looks like it's wearing a mitten.
You can't aggregate options, separate options from their arguments with
a blank, or other cool getopt features because the program doesn't use
getopt in order to preserve its retro look.
Over the last thirty years numerous people have suggested the program
might be enhanced by adding options to raise two fingers (``peace'') or
only one finger (well, you know). Please send me the code if you make
this decades-long dream a reality.
SEE ALSOascii(7)AUTHOR
John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/
This software is in the public domain. Permission to use, copy, modify,
and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and
without fee is hereby granted, without any conditions or restrictions.
This software is provided ``as is'' without express or implied war‐
ranty.
4th Berkeley Distribution 25 NOV 2001 FIST(1)
