Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

  
 
  

home | help
ROBOTFINDSKITTEN(6)		  Games Manual		     ROBOTFINDSKITTEN(6)

NAME
     robotfindskitten - help robot find kitten

SYNOPSIS
     robotfindskitten [ -n number ] [ -s seed ] [ -f filename ]

DESCRIPTION
     In  this  game, you are robot ( # ).  Your job is to find kitten. This task
     is complicated by the existence of various  things  which	are  not  kitten
     (collectively known as Non Kitten Items or NKIs). Robot must touch items to
     determine if they are kitten or not. The game ends when robot finds kitten.

     You  can  move robot with the arrow keys, the EMACS keys (^N, ^P, ^B and ^F
     for down, up, left and right), the keypad keys (all 8 directions), and  the
     nethack keys (all 8 directions; hjklyubn is left, down, up, right, up-left,
     up-right, down-left and down-right).

     You  can  press Ctrl-L at any time to redraw the screen. You can press q at
     any time to quit.	A good old-fashioned Ctrl-C quits too.

OPTIONS
     You can optionally specify the number of Non Kitten Items to use  with  the
     -n option. The default is 20.

     You  can  set  the random-number seed, normally initialized from the system
     clock, with the -s option.  This may be useful for debugging.

     You can supply an arbitrary file from which to draw NKIs using the  -f  op-
     tion.

FILES
     robotfindskitten(6)  reads  all of the files in the ~/.robotfindskitten and
     /usr/local/share/robotfindskitten	directories.  Each  line  of  each  file
     matching  *.nki becomes the description of a Non Kitten Item.  Lines begin-
     ning with '#' or '%' are ignored.	This allows comments to be used  in  nki
     files and allows fortune(6) files to be used.

ENVIRONMENT
     robotfindskitten(6)  uses	the HOME environment variable to find the ~/.ro-
     botfindskitten directory.

EXIT STATUS
     The exit status is 0 if robot found kitten; 1 if you quit or  there  was  a
     problem;  and the signal number if robotfindskitten(6) exits gracefully due
     to a signal.

A FINAL THOUGHT
     Day and night I feverishly worked upon the machine, creating  both  a  soul
     which  could  desire  its	goal, and a body with which it could realize it.
     Many who saw my creation called it an  abomination,  and  denied  me  grant
     money.  But  they	could  not dissuade me from my impossible task. It was a
     spectre that tormented me always, a ghost I had to give a form and a  life,
     lest it consume me from the inside. And when at last my task was done, when
     the  grey	box  on wheels was complete and when it, as well as I, knew what
     had to be done, I felt deep sympathy for the machine. For	I  had	not  de-
     stroyed  the  phantom, but merely exorcized it into another body. The robot
     knew not why this task had to be performed, for I could not imbue	it  with
     knowledge I did not myself possess. And at the same time, I felt a sweeping
     sense  of	relief sweep over me, that somehow, the dream that had driven me
     for my entire life had come one step closer to fruition.

     "Gort, Klaatu Verada Nikto"

     As I vocally activated the robot, I realized that it was following  my  in-
     structions, but not out of any desire to obey me. Had I remained silent, it
     would  have  performed exactly the same operations. We were two beings con-
     trolled by the same force now. And yet, seeking vainly to hold  some  illu-
     sion  of  control over the machine I thought I had created, I gave my final
     command.

     "GO!"  I told the box as it began to roll	out  of  my  workshop  into  the
     frozen desert beyond. "FIND KITTEN!"

       -- The Book of Found Kittens, pages 43-4, author unknown

SEE ALSO
     robotfindskitten web page: http://robotfindskitten.org/
     sourceforge page:	http://sourceforge.net/projects/rfk/

AUTHORS
     robotfindskitten	 was	originally   written   by   Leonard   Richardson
     <leonardr@segfault.org> for DOS in 1997.  He rewrote it for Linux in  1999.
     Since  then robotfindskitten has been ported and/or rewritten for countless
     other platforms.  The current POSIX code is based on code originally  writ-
     ten by Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt@freeshell.org>.

     The POSIX development team consists of:
     Alexey Toptygin
     David Griffith
     Eric S. Raymond
     Leonard Richardson
     George Moffitt
     Jake Berendes
     Lukas Eklund
     Neale Pickett
     Nick Moffitt
     Peter A. Peterson II
     Phil Ulrich (Mac OS X)
     Ryan Finnie (Debian Maintainer)
     Sean Neakums

				October 11, 2005	     ROBOTFINDSKITTEN(6)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=robotfindskitten&sektion=6&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

home | help