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FORTUNE(6) Games Manual FORTUNE(6) NAME fortune -- print a random, hopefully interesting, adage SYNOPSIS fortune [-aDefilosw] [-m pattern] [[N%] file/directory/all] DESCRIPTION When fortune is run with no arguments it prints out a random epigram. Epi- grams are divided into several categories, where each category is subdi- vided 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 additional debugging output. Specify this option multiple times for more verbose output. Only available if compiled with -DDEBUG. -e Consider all fortune files to be of equal size (see discussion be- low on multiple files). -f Print out the list of files which would be searched, but do not print a fortune. -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 not willing, you will 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. -i Ignore case for -m patterns. -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 preceded by a percentage, which is a number N between 0 and 100 inclusive, followed by a `%'. 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 per- cent will apply to those files and/or directories, in which case the proba- bility 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 unnec- essary, since 10% is all that is left). The -e option says to consider all files equal; thus fortune -e funny not-funny is equivalent to fortune 50% funny 50% not-funny ENVIRONMENT FORTUNE_PATH The search path for the data files. It is a colon-separated list of directories in which fortune looks for data files. If not set it will default to /usr/share/games/fortune:/usr/local/share/games/fortune. If none of the directories specified exist, it will print a warning and exit. FORTUNE_SAVESTATE If set, fortune will save some state about what fortune it was up to on disk. FILES /usr/share/games/fortune/* the fortunes databases (those files ending "-o" contain the offensive fortunes) EXIT STATUS The fortune utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. In par- ticular, if -l, -m, or -s is specified, failure to find a matching citation in the selected files counts as an error. SEE ALSO arc4random_uniform(3), regcomp(3), regex(3), strfile(8) HISTORY The fortune utility first appeared Version 7 AT&T UNIX. FreeBSD ports 15.1 July 1, 2021 FORTUNE(6)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | EXIT STATUS | SEE ALSO | HISTORY
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