FORTUNE(6) BSD Reference Manual FORTUNE(6)
NAME
fortune - print a random, hopefully interesting, adage
SYNOPSIS
fortune [-aefilosw] [-m pattern] [[N%] file/directory/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 sub-
divided 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 be-
lieve 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 exe-
cuted 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 preced-
ed by a percentage, which is a number N between 0 and 100 inclusive, fol-
lowed by a '%' character. If it is, there will be an N percent probabili-
ty that an adage will be picked from that file or directory. If the per-
centages do not sum to 100, and there are specifications without percen-
tages, the remaining percent will apply to those files and/or direc-
tories, 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.
FILES
/usr/share/games/fortune/* Fortune files.
SEE ALSO
regex(3), random(6), rot13(6)
MirBSD #10-current April 19, 1994 1