gofort

Yet another fortune clone, written in Go.

Besides that, what's different here?

1. Uses simple text files. No effort has been done to re-implement parsing the strfiles as in original fortune and some other clones.
2. Uses a streaming approach combined with reservoir sampling instead of reading whole files into memory first.
3. Self-contained binary, only using the standard library. Fortune files are bundled via go:embed.

tl;dr: simple, efficient and self-contained.

Bootstrapping

Just some ideas where you could use this.

initramfs

Hook it into intramfs when you're feeling extra lucky. Take a look at this repository.

Bash

echo "~/path/to/gofort" >> ~/.bashrc

Zsh

echo "~/path/to/gofort" >> ~/.zshrc

motd

The motd setup is distro-specific:

• On Debian and Ubuntu, the update-motd mechanism can be used with a script that launches motd.
• On Arch, it's a bit more complicated:
  • One way to do it is described in this repo (replace the update_motd.sh with your own script).
  • If you don't want to use PAM, you can of course also use a cronjob or systemd timer to regularly populate /etc/motd with a fortune by executing gofort.