FORTUNE(6) BSD Games Manual FORTUNE(6)NAMEfortune — print a random, hopefully interesting, adage
SYNOPSISfortune [-aefilosw] [-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 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
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.
-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 alternative 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 inclu‐
sive, 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 the strfile(8) utility, which is not
installed by default, The source code for this utility can be found in
/usr/src/games/fortune/strfile, if it exists.
FILES
/usr/share/games/fortune/* Fortune files.
SEE ALSOregex(3), random(6), rot13(6)BSD September 9, 2004 BSD
