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.