Friday Fun: Fortune - Random wit & wisdom

Fedora Daily Package

Friday, June 22. 2007

Posted by Chris Tyler in Friday Fun at 14:38 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday Fun: Fortune - Random wit & wisdom


For years, many Unix and Linux systems have greeted text-mode users with a piece of random wisdom or wit each time they log in. This daily smile is provided by the fortune program, which is in the fortune-mod package.

The actual database of sayings is stored in several files in /usr/share/games/fortune, divided into categories: for example, /usr/share/games/fortune/wisdom* contains "wise" sayings, and /usr/share/games/pets* contains quotes about pets (no lolcats, though!).

There is an additional package of sayings available: fortune-firefly contains sayings from the science-fiction TV series Firefly and the movie Serenity. This package doesn't show up in the graphical installer's browse tab, but you can find it on the search or list tabs or install it from the command line.

When you run the fortune program, it will randomly select one saying from the fortune files. You can select a short or long saying with the -s or -l options, and you can specify the message database on the command line:
$ fortune -s
$ fortune wisdom
You can also specify several databases, with a percentage probability for each. If you wanted a 90% chance of selecting a saying from Firefly and a 10% chance of selecting ASCII art:
$ fortune 90% firefly 10% ascii-art
To print a fortune each time you login (in text mode), add the fortune command to your ~/.bash_profile:
$ echo "fortune" >>~/.bash_profile
Or add it to /etc/profile so all users see a fortune:
# echo "fortune wisdom" >>~/.bash_profile
You can also use fortune to create a witty signature at the bottom of your outgoing e-mails. In Evolution, for example, you can do this by going into Edit > Preferences > Composer Preferences > Signature and clicking "Add Script". Enter "Fortune" for the name and "/usr/bin/fortune" as the script. Be aware that this will pick any random saying, which might not be appropriate for some correspondents; you may be better off creating a bash script that runs fortune with specific arguments (to select the fortune length and database) and using that script to generate your signatures (you could also add some echo statements to output additional text such as a separator line).

Installing from the command line: yum install fortune-mod
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Games and Entertainment > fortune-mod
Menu location after installation: (none)
Command: /usr/bin/fortune
Upstream website: http://www.redellipse.net/code/fortune

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love the firefly fortunes.
Now I have to watch the DVD's again.
Good thing I am on vacation.
#1 Brian Gray on 2007-06-22 20:49 (Reply)
Your Evolution tip won't work, because Evo expects HTML on stdin. So, what I did was to create a custom script making plain text into HTML:

#!/bin/sh
#Insert your constant tagline here.
echo -e "-- "
$(dirname $0)/fortune | sed -e 's//\>/' \
-e 's/$//'

and in order to have some personal info in my sig, I have custom fortune script:

#!/bin/sh
#Insert your constant tagline here.
cat
#2 Matej Cepl on 2007-06-25 07:10 (Reply)
Thanks for your note. On F7, Evolution works just fine with /usr/bin/fortune as a signature-generating script (tested on two very different machines), but you're right that it is a good idea to wrap fortune in another script to customize the output. (Unfortunately I think the blog software ate some of the characters in your script, sorry about that).
#2.1 Chris Tyler on 2007-06-25 09:27 (Reply)
FYI: fortune-firefly contains quotes from the TV series Firefly and the movie Serenity .... not Serendipity.
#3 Neil on 2007-08-21 05:22 (Reply)
Whoops -- fixed! Thanks.
#3.1 Chris Tyler on 2007-08-21 10:26 (Reply)
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