A while ago I made a fortune database that draws from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I used to have a tmux pane that ran them on my work session boot script :)
Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#12On arch, fortune builds with the -o (offensive) flag disabled. Talk about censorship!
Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#13It's sad that some distros refuse to package with -o option support anymore
I adopted the fortunes-it package on debian, after I think over 20 years of neglect. Debian ships the offensive fortunes in a separate .deb so it needs to be installed on purpose, and it's not recommended by the regular one. But it's there. I actually moved a bunch of stuff into the offensive section, or just removed them. Humour has changed a lot since the last time that package had been touched. Political jokes mad…
>or just removed them.
How does it feel... to go through fortunes and decide what's OK for other people worldwide to see or not.
Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#14Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#15Sit right back and I'll tell you a tale. Fortune is a parasite glommed over the original intents of the Architecture of what is now known as Fortune.
Originally as the high gods intended the whole mess was nothing but a Rolodex, a box of index cards, etc.
You see, the first line of the '%' delimited records would be a 'LAST FIRST PHONE' and the rest would be for instance 'SMITH, JOE 867-5309' on the rest would be 'wife Mary, 3 kids (Joseph, Adam, Beth), maybe address, etc.'.
The '.dat' portion created by the 'strfile' would take that file and alphabetize it and then keep the 'seek' offsets in the file for each record. This let you have a big (for the time) Rolodex with fast retrieval upon search. Binary tree and all that, plus fast read of whole record because ... binary search, read one line match or not then difference between match and next record would be bytes needed to read (minus 1 for the '%'.
Fortune 'fortune(6)' started life as an address book,The random and multiple files and all that jazz was just a bunch of repurposing that took over and became a life of it's own. Nobody uses the 'first line sort' bit of 'strfile' program. Mostly the original has vanished into the wind, I have no clue what the command line thing was to bring up the Rolodex/Index Card of somebody was.
The 'man' page doesn't do it justice, but nobody really cares, and I like many others have a '~/quotes' file that is automated and hot-key bound to selecting a bit of text and preassing a couple of keys. If you know the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling thing, you dont' even need the '.dat' file for the random bit.
Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I adopted the fortunes-it package on debian, after I think over 20 years of neglect. Debian ships the offensive fortunes in a separate .deb so it needs to be installed on purpose, and it's not recommended by the regular one. But it's there. I actually moved a bunch of stuff into the offensive section, or just removed them. Humour has changed a lot since the last time that package had been touched. Political jokes mad…
>or just removed them. How does it feel... to go through fortunes and decide what's OK for other people worldwide to see or not.
I'm quite sure that 99% of the people who install fortunes-it are in fact concentrated into a particular country and not evenly spread worldwide.
Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#17It's sad that some distros refuse to package with -o option support anymore
I adopted the fortunes-it package on debian, after I think over 20 years of neglect. Debian ships the offensive fortunes in a separate .deb so it needs to be installed on purpose, and it's not recommended by the regular one. But it's there. I actually moved a bunch of stuff into the offensive section, or just removed them. Humour has changed a lot since the last time that package had been touched. Political jokes mad…
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Re: Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page
#18Sit right back and I'll tell you a tale. Fortune is a parasite glommed over the original intents of the Architecture of what is now known as Fortune. Originally as the high gods intended the whole mess was nothing but a Rolodex, a box of index cards, etc. You see, the first line of the '%' delimited records would be a 'LAST FIRST PHONE' and the rest would be for instance 'SMITH, JOE 867-5309' on the rest would be 'wi…
> SMITH, JOE 867-5309
That's Jenny's number, not Joe's