fortune - print a random, hopefully interesting, adage
NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION FILES BUGS TO DO REVISION HISTORY AUTHOR COPYRIGHT and LICENSENAME
fortune − print a random, hopefully interesting, adage
SYNOPSIS
fortune [−adefilosvw] [−n length] [−m pattern] [[N%] file/dir/all]
DESCRIPTION
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.)
−d Enable debug messages.
−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 do not
print a fortune.
−l Long dictums only. See −n on how
"long" is defined in this sense.
−m I<pattern>
Print out all fortunes which match the regular expression
pattern.
See L<perlre(1)> for a description of patterns.
−n I<length>
Set the longest fortune length (in characters) considered to
be
``short'' (the default is 160). All fortunes longer than
this
are considered ``long''. If you set the length too short and
ask for short fortunes, or too long and ask for long ones,
you will get an error.
−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
offended. (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. See −n on which
fortunes are considered
"short".
−i Ignore case for −m patterns.
−v Show version number and exit.
−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 %. If it is, there will be a 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%
not−funny'' 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
FILES
fortune readme ./fortunes ./fortunes/fortunes1 ./fortunes/fortunes2−o ./fortunes/fortunes2 ./fortunes/limerick ./fortunes/lwall ./fortunes/startrek ./fortunes/zippy
BUGS
Currently there is no installer and the fortunes listed above are not included. Because of this, fortune might not find any files unless you specify them on the command line.
TO DO
Bundle files and possibly make an installer.
REVISION HISTORY
Revision 2.1
2006/01/16 mike ciul
Enabled a lot of options
Fixed known bugs
Added −n option
Revision 1.0.1 1999/06/07 andy murren
Small fixes and code clean up
FindBin now helps locate the directory of fortunes
Will search multiple files for a match
Dumped the −g option I tried in the original
Revision 1.0 1999/04/01 andy murren
Initial Revision
AUTHOR
This Perl implementation of fortune was written by Andy Murren, [email protected].
COPYRIGHT and LICENSE
This program is covered by the GNU Public License (GPL). See <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html> for complete detail of the license.