Arch Linux

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

fortune: a case of extreme ignorance

Hi, everybody,

I've been wondering for a while, why my Xfce tips of the day come up blank. Searching the forum I discovered that the package fortune-mod is lacking. After the installation tips did appear, sure enough. I got curious, but Google told me only one thing beyond reasonable doubt: I'm  probably the only person left on this earth who never heard of this particular kind of fortune . Anybody care to fill me in on it?

skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: fortune: a case of extreme ignorance

Fortune is a program that's been in Unix for decades. All it does is pull a random chunk of text from a specially formatted text file. It was designed to act like a virtual fortune cookie (hence the name), but it can be used anywhere you need random text. It seems the XFCE developers used it to implement the tip of the day. Debian does something similar, running fortune when you log in to give a tip of the day.

Fortune-mod is a re-write of the original fortune to modernize it and add features.

I run it from my shell .rc so I get something funny, interesting, or insightful every time I open a terminal window.

Last edited by skymt (2008-03-05 12:48:34)