This version of fortune is a modification of the NetBSD fortune, as tweaked by Florian La Roche (see below, and many thanks to Florian for starting the update), and then massively hacked on by Amy Lewis. I (Amy) hacked on this because it was broken; the BSD source itself is broken (I looked at it). Specifically, if you are using an old version of fortune, then it accesses *only* the two files "fortunes" and "fortunes-o", even though 'fortune -[ao]f' will tell you differently. That was my original reason to start working with the code. Bug fixes: fortune now reads the same file list that it reports with -f. strfile now really sorts and randomizes, instead of just setting the 'sorted' and 'randomized' flags. strfile does not lose the pointer to a fortune that follows a null fortune. Enhancements: fortune -f now prints percentages, whether specified on the command line or not. fortune -m now prints filenames to stderr; the fortunes printed to stdout can be redirected into a file which is valid strfile format. fortune -l|s can be modified with -n _number_ to specify the number of characters in a short fortune (default 160, as before). The means of distinguishing between offensive and inoffensive fortunes is changed: offensive fortunes are put in a separate subdirectory. The contents of the fortunes databases have been extensively reviewed, and broken into smaller, more manageable [hopefully] files. strfile is not notably enhanced, though it received the most significant bug fixes. unstr now accepts a command line parameter -c _char_ which globally changes the delimiter character. unstr now accepts an output file as the second file parameter, and can tell if a file has a '.dat' extension. An example of the use of fortune-style databases for other purposes, called randstr, has been added. See util/README.randstr The Makefiles have been extensively hacked upon. Bugs: combining -a with xx% filename, when _filename_ is found in both the offensive and the inoffensive directories, causes fortune to exit without an error message. I think it's confused as to which file gets the xx%. I should fix this. Don't hold your breath, though. For more information, see the files ChangeLog, Offensive, README.install, and cookie-files in the top-level directory, and the comments in the various *.c source files. Amy A. Lewis alewis@email.unc.edu October, 1995 ----Florian's README.LINUX--- I have looked at sunsite and tsx and found one very old fortune program and one in the debian Linux distribution. But comparing that one with the version in NetBSD-current showed me, that NetBSD-current has fixed so many speeling-bugs that I just had to repackage everything for the Linux community. In the source package are all changes for Linux in the file LINUX.DIF. (Rewriting the Makefiles and some trivial small fixes.) I expect this "fortune.tar.gz" to show up under /pub/Linux/games. Not only the kernel needs speeling-corrections, Florian La Roche florian@jurix.jura.uni-sb.de April 1995