From alewis@email.unc.edu Thu Oct 19 11:49:00 MET 1995 Article: 73781 of comp.os.linux.misc Path: jurix.jura.uni-sb.de!pf2.phil.uni-sb.de!news.coli.uni-sb.de!news.dfn.de!Germany.EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!concert!bigblue.oit.unc.edu!not-for-mail From: alewis@email.unc.edu (Amelia A Lewis) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Fortune under Linux? Date: 1 Oct 1995 00:09:02 -0400 Organization: The mystical world of Talsever Lines: 163 Message-ID: <44l48u$2nm@talsever.fantasy.nonet> References: <44anfb$v0f@CUBoulder.Colorado.EDU> <44atdu$1s5i@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU> <44htl0$1u3@auriga.galacta.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: login1.isis.unc.edu In article <44htl0$1u3@auriga.galacta.demon.co.uk>, Dr. Rich Artym wrote: > >What I'd like to know is why the fortunes in Slackware are so lousy!!!! [deleted] >in any way related. Or is there a randomization fault as someone >suggested, and only a bad subset is being selected? Nah, unlikely ... Okay. I'm fairly certain that BSD fortune, and the strfile and unstr utilities included with it, are broken as distributed. If you'd like to test whether yours is, here's how. prompt# cd /path/where/you/keep/your/fortune/files prompt# mv fortunes fortunes-bak promtp# mv fortunes.dat fortunes-bak.dat prompt# cat ->fortunes This is fortune #1 % This is fortune #2 % This is fortune #3 % ^D prompt# strfile fortunes prompt# fortune -f Now, you have a list of the files that fortune claims it's looking at. It probably isn't correct. Test it by running: prompt# fortune ten times. If all you see is "This is fortune #n" over and over, then your copy of fortune is broken. The fix is to fix the code that creates this silliness. The workaround is simpler. Assuming that you've done all the above, the following works. If you *haven't* done the test above, then before doing what follows, *rename* fortunes and fortunes.dat, or you'll wish you had! prompt# rm fortunes prompt# rm fortunes.dat prompt# ln -s . fortunes fortune will now display the same list with -f that it actually accesses. You may find a sudden increase in the variety of fortunes that are displayed. strfile and unstr are also broken. strfile *does* perform its basic function, creating a .dat file, correctly, so as long as you don't wish to sort or randomize the database, and don't have a null fortune (i.e.: % % ) in the text file, you won't have a problem (if you have a null fortune, the next fortune after it is skipped). To test it (since you won't believe me), try the following: prompt# cd /path/where/you/keep/your/fortune/files prompt# cat ->test z % a % x % s % ^D prompt# strfile -io test prompt# unstr test >test.sorted prompt# cat test.sorted At this point, you *should* see: a % s % x % z % But you won't. It will be in the same order that you entered it, above. Try: prompt# diff test test.sorted And you'll see that there are no differences (well, actually, unstr may strip that trailing "%\n"). Showing that the next fortune after a null is skipped is a bit more complex. Trust me on that one, or look at the code, and note that if the last fortune was null, the current pointer isn't written. There are no workarounds, except to use different utilities to try to sort the database. The REAL solution: I have fixed source code. I'm delaying uploading it, because I'm still working on reorganizing the data files. But the source for the binaries *is* fixed, and even enhanced (you can now specify length to break between long and short fortunes, -f shows percentages, and strfile now sorts, randomizes, and ignores null fortunes, while unstr takes an output file parameter and allows you to globally change the delimiter character). As I say, I'm now planning on uploading this (probably as fortune-mod.tar.gz, since someone might decide to fix the BSD code without introducing quite as many changes as I have), but I want to include the datafiles as well (I've changed the way to distinguish between offensive and inoffensive from the '-o' infix to separate subdirectories, and I'm trying hard to take out the multiple redundancy, the presence of which was obscured by the fact that strfile wouldn't really sort). So. If your fortune is broken, and you don't want to use the workarounds suggested above, and *just* *can't* *wait*, I can send you the code for the binaries. Or you can wait a bit, and I'll upload the whole mess, fixed. I've also added a minor fortune-like program that you could use to generate things like random signatures, lotteries, and like that. Minor note: if any FreeBSD/NetBSD people are reading this, you might want to look at the source for fortune and strfile. Where fortune calls add_file, in form_file_list, it incorrectly makes a different list if Find_files is set and if it isn't. Fixing strfile is a bit more complex, but sorting and randomizing can be enabled just by not using a loop control variable (in str_cmp and I forget the name of the randomize function) that's set to zero at the top of the loop (put fprintf(stderr, "Loop control variable i set to %ld\n", i); just before the loop, and see!). That doesn't fix the null-string problem (you need to add a fix_last_pointer to do that, backing up over the just-written pointer to a null string). I'd offer diffs, but I've also changed the order of function definitions (main last, and others in the order that they need to be to avoid implicit declarations), so diffs would probably be as large as the source itself, apart from the things that I think are enhancements. Point is, your fortune/strfile/unstr is broken, too, since the Linux one is a straightforward port of yours. Disclaimer: I'm not particularly well-trained as a programmer (self-taught, for the most part; my formal training was in Pascal fifteen years ago), and I've introduced one bug (documented in the man pages and readme) into fortune. I've been beating on my binaries to try to make them crash, and I'm pretty sure that there's just the one bug (it's rather obscure--happens when you specify -a and a percentage for a filename that exists in the offensive and inoffensive directories). I'm reasonably certain that my mods won't break anything, but you may prefer not to trust me (and if there's a hotshot programmer who feels like taking my hacks to the code and rationalizing the whole program, feel free), and back up your old files first. Oh, and the sorting performed by strfile only looks at the first line, so if the first line is empty, or contains only non-alphanumeric characters, strfile 'sorts' it into the space between alphanumerics (between a and b, or b and c, or c and d, etc.). I don't know why that is, but it isn't *my* bug. It's now documented, so consider it a feature. :-) Amy! -- alewis@email.unc.edu "But pain ... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is: what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?" --Cordelia Vorkosigan [L.M. Bujold]