acorn fortune file encryption

[John Bowler]

In article <1991May28.141547.19867 at ohm.york.ac.uk> pete at ohm.york.ac.uk (-Pete French.) writes:
>Does anyone know the format of the encryption of the fortune file
>on the acorn UNIX RISC machines ?

It's not encrypted; it is the standard BSD fortune file format (as
defined by the files strfile.h and strfile.c in the 4.3 distribution).
If you use the strings command you will see the fortunes (but without
clear delimination - all you need to know for that is that the strings
are NUL terminated).

>                                  I am trying to get the fortune file
>off the acorn working on the MIPS/SUN systems here (since it is far better).

All we did was supplement the BSD distribution with the fortunes which
have been posted on UseNet (alt.sources?) recently.  The file should be
understood by any BSD 4.3 fortune program running on a little-endian
architecture.  You could probably convert it to a big-endian architecture
by intelligent application of byte swapping (you need the strfile.h
header file of course - copyright you-know-who).

John Bowler (jbowler at acorn.co.uk)