fortune - print a random, hopefully interesting, adage
fortune [-aefilosw] [-m pattern] [[N%] file/directory/all]
When fortune is run with no arguments it prints out a random
epigram.
Epigrams are divided into several categories, where each
category is subdivided
into those which are potentially offensive and those
which are
not. The options are as follows:
-a Choose from all lists of maxims, both offensive and
not. (See the
-o option for more information on offensive fortunes.)
-e Consider all fortune files to be of equal size (see
discussion below
on multiple files).
-f Print out the list of files which would be searched,
but don't
print a fortune.
-i Ignore case for -m patterns.
-l Long dictums only.
-m pattern
Print out all fortunes which match the regular expression pattern.
See regex(3) for a description of patterns.
-o Choose only from potentially offensive aphorisms.
Please, please,
please request a potentially offensive fortune if and
only if you
believe, deep down in your heart, that you are willing
to be of-
fended. (And that if you are, you'll just quit using
-o rather
than give us grief about it, okay?)
... let us keep in mind the basic governing philosophy of The
Brotherhood, as handsomely summarized in these
words: we believe
in healthy, hearty laughter -- at the expense of the
whole human race, if needs be. Needs be.
--H. Allen Smith, "Rude Jokes"
-s Short apothegms only.
-w Wait before termination for an amount of time calculated from the
number of characters in the message. This is useful
if it is executed
as part of the logout procedure to guarantee
that the message
can be read before the screen is cleared.
The user may specify alternate sayings. You can specify a
specific file,
a directory which contains one or more files, or the special
word all,
which says to use all the standard databases. Any of these
may be preceded
by a percentage, which is a number N between 0 and 100
inclusive,
followed by a `%' character. If it is, there will be an N
percent probability
that an adage will be picked from that file or directory. If the
percentages do not sum to 100, and there are specifications
without percentages,
the remaining percent will apply to those files
and/or directories,
in which case the probability of selecting from one of
them will be
based on their relative sizes.
As an example, given two databases funny and not-funny, with
funny twice
as big, saying
$ fortune funny not-funny
will get you fortunes out of funny two-thirds of the time.
The command
$ fortune 90% funny 10% not-funny
will pick out 90% of its fortunes from funny (the ``10%'' is
unnecessary,
since 10% is all that's left). The -e option says to consider all files
equal; thus
$ fortune -e
is equivalent to
$ fortune 50% funny 50% not-funny
Datafiles for fortune are created by a utility called
strfile. Although
not installed by default, the source code and a manual page
for this
utility can be found in /usr/src/games/fortune/strfile/, if
it exists.
/usr/share/games/fortune/* Fortune files.
regex(3), random(6), rot13(6)
OpenBSD 3.6 April 19, 1994
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