[Chapter 3] 3.3 Electronic Fortune Cookies
Author: Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Date: 1998-08-04T21:32:31Z

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## 3.3 Electronic Fortune Cookies

>     It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
>                     - Andrew Jackson

>     Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.
>                     - Mae West

>     Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
>     incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
>                     - G. B. Shaw

>     Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
>                     - Wernher von Braun

>     I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with
>     sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
>                     - Galileo

>     Computers are useless; they can only give answers.
>                     - Picasso

>     Dyslexics of the world, untie!

These messages come from a program named fortune-usually in the /usr/games directory. Every time you run fortune you'll get a message like one of these. Most users run fortune from their .profile or .logout files. If the directory /usr/games isn't in your search path (8.7), use the command /usr/games/fortune instead.

Every time someone runs fortune, the program has to write to its fortunes.dat file. Computers with networked filesystems might put that file on a "read-only" filesystem that most users can't write to. If you get that error and your system is set up to run rsh (1.33) without needing a password, ask your system administrator which computer has the filesystem mounted writable. Then run:

>     % rsh that-machine /usr/games/fortune

Some other versions use another way to keep track of fortunes; their files don't need to be writable.

- JP

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