Mail to fortune (Re: Why is fortune writing to the fortunes.dat file?)

[Jean Diaz]

In article <10868 at orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>, pvo at uther.CS.ORST.EDU (Paul V O'Neill) writes:
> 
> Around day 1 of my exposure to UN*X I chanced upon the fortune(6) usage
> blurb.  It ended with the sentence:
> 	Mail suggested fortunes to "fortune"
> 
> I've learned a lot since then, and manage a few systems now, but I never
> have figured out how to mail a fortune to fortune(6). (Only tried the
> obvious--aliasing "fortune" to "|/usr/games/fortune" -- didn't work.)

Actually, I believe the answer is even simpler than that.  Don't
forget that fortune(6) came out of Berkeley.  Mail to "fortune" was
aliased to go to the human maintainer of the fortunes file, who adds
the fortune by hand.  (This is what we do at MIT Project Athena as
well.)

				AMBAR
ambar at ora.uu.net 				{uunet,adelie}!ora!ambar