Fortune Fortune Files

The fortune utility is a fun little utility that, when called, outputs a fortune to stdout.

The fortunes are found in (generally) /usr/share/games/fortunes. To create you own fortunes, create a text file in that folder (you will need root privileges), and separate each fortune with a % sign on a separate line. (See the current files for examples.)

After you save your file, use the strfile utility to create a .dat file that fortune can read.

Offensive or potentially offensive fortunes should have -o appended to the file name and be placed in /usr/share/games/fortunes/off. The command fortune -o will return a fortune from any file found in that directly.

For more information, see the fortune(6) and (especially) strfile(1) pages.

More files are available here and here.

About these files:

• kjodlenet — A list of quotations that appear in the header of my home page.

• hesse — Quotations from Herman Hesse.

• musicians — Quotations from musicians (WIP)

• amer-authors — Quotations from USian authors (WIP)

Offensive Quotations

My installation was missing any offensive fortunes, so I went searching. I found a set of fortune files at OpenGrok and have added the offensive fortune file here. (If you go there, I urge you to read the "Notes" file.) As noted in the fortune manual, proceed with caution, or not at all if you are easily offended.