0cjs / unfortunate

The Uncompiled Fortune Cookie Program

unfortunate: The Uncompiled Fortune Cookie Program

This is a substitute for the standard BSD /usr/games/fortune program. It's designed for a portable personal set of fortune cookies.

Unlike the standard fortune-mod program or misfortune, it does not need compiled indices for the fortune database (the .dat files), nor does it even use compiiled code. Instead it's a simple Bash script that works from the standard fortune source files sans indices.

On modern computers, and especially with a personal fortune collection that is relatively small compared the full set distributed with most Unix distributions, the indices now seem to be an unnecessary optimization.

Usage

This is designed to be used as a dot-home module:

mkdir -p ~/.home
cd ~/.home
git clone https://github.com/dot-home/_dot-home.git     # Core system
git clone https://github.com/dot-home/fortunesh.git     # This repo
~/.home/_dot-home/bin/dot-home-setup

However, you can also use it standalone:

1. Copy bin/fortune to ~/.local/bin/ or another directory in your path.
2. Put your fortune cookie files under ~/.local/share/fortune.

File Format

Fortunes are stored in any number of files in ~/.local/share/fortune. Within a file a % alone on a line separates individual fortunes.

Bugs

• Standard fortune appears to % as a fortune terminator, not separator, as this program does. Adding % at the end of every fortune file would produce empty fortunes at this point. (Also, the Wikipedia entry for fortunate appears to incorrectly assert that % is a separator, not a terminator.)
• For compatibility with other fortune programs, this should ignore files ending in .dat. (These are the compiled indices for the fortune cookie files.)
• This should probably also look for fortune files in subdirs of the fortune dir, as fortune-mod does.
• This should be configurable to read the standard system fortune files (under /usr/share/games/fortune/) as well.
• There's currently no support for offensive fortunes (the -o flag). Files containing offensive fortunes are stored either under an off subdir or end with -o, and the fortunes themselves are stored in rot13 format.