Fortune provides a random quote or aphorism every time you open a terminal in Linux. I wanted to have a personalized fortune using zuihitsu quotes posted on this site come up whenever I opened a terminal. If you want to do something similar, here’s the procedure.
To check if you have it installed, simply type fortune into the terminal.
$ fortune This either returned a fortune or an error message. If you got an error message, then install fortune using the package manager for your system.
$ sudo apt install fortune-modLet’s create our own file of fortunes. I want to use my zuihitsu quotes I have posted on this site. This file is a text file that looks like so:
%
quote 1
%
quote 2
%
quote ...There is a copy of the file available online.
If you have just a file with lines of quotes, this is easy to get into this format using emacs. Simply type: M-%, followed by c-q c-j Enter then c-q c-j % c-q c-j Enter. I like to check the replacements, so just keep hitting y to do the replacement and move on to the next one if it looks good. Save the file to the appropriate directory, which on Debian systems is /usr/share/games/fortunes, but can vary. For explanation purposes, we are going to assume the file was named zuihitsu with no file extension.
Note: If you are using the file above, just save it as a text file in your directory. Then, copy it to the appropriate system directory without a file extension.
Now, create a .dat file for the file you just made.
$ sudo strfile zuihitsuSet the same permissions on the new files as the others in the directory. This just makes the files readable to groups and others.
$ sudo chmod og+r zuihitsu
$ sudo chmod og+r zuihitsu.dat
Following the rest of the directory. I added a symbolic link.
$ sudo ln -s zuihitsu zuihitsu.u8You should be able to test it now.
$ fortune zuihitsuAssuming that worked. The final thing to do is to have your preferred shell call this when it runs. I use bash, so I added the command above to my bash_aliases file. From then on, it will pull a random quote from the zuihitsu file every time you bring up the terminal.
Bonus
Make a fortune come up automatically every time you login or open a new terminal by adding the following to .bashrc or .bash_aliases:
fortune zuihitsu Also, if you use mutt, you can add the following to your .muttrc file to have this fortune file generate a random signature for your emails:
set signature="fortune zuihitsu -s|"The -s selects shorts quotes and the | pipes it to your email text.
Did you know the original fortune-mod fortune collection is available as a EPUB?
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