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.