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.
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