About Motd

Message of the day, "fortunes" - "fortune cookies", derived from various FreeBSD and Linux sources.

A staple for Unix/Linux users for decades, but largely unknown to the general public, it's hard to describe this incredible collection. Not only

amusing, arch, facetious, pithy, humorous, ironic, jocose, keen, satirical, sharp, smart, taunting, witty, biting...

the collection also provides a fascinating view of the culture of early computer priesthood and users through the Unix looking glass.

Here is an example

A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.
                -- THE ABC'S OF UNIX

A few more

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

Carperpetuation (kar' pur pet u a shun), n.:
        The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string at least a
dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then
putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

- 3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population

- The rain in Spain fall mainly on Spaniards

- Trying to establish voice contact ... please YELL into keyboard

How this came to be
The collection was originally gathered from files in /usr/share/games/fortunes of various Unix/Linux open-source distributions of the late 90's as test material for a browser based text reader.

Some apparently liked what they saw. And, after a few repeat requests, I decided to make the collection available online.

Acknowledgement
The many authors and FreeBSD and Linux users whose enthusiasm led to creation of this amazing collection.

Enjoy! and don't forget to vote for your favorite "Best" and "Worst" of Fortunes.