is there a mail app that does this?

[John Voigt]

On 01/03/2005 10:48 AM, dep eloquently noted:

> quoth Matthew Carpenter:
> 
> | I'm not sure exactly what you are asking about the program versus
> | text editor?  I believe fortune's database is not text-editable (I
> | could be wrong) but do you want to do something that "$ fortune >
> | temp.file" doesn't get you?

The file(s) that fortune actually uses to generate output is/are not directly 
editable, however, they are created from text-editable files (see below). 
Fortune can take any of these ".dat" files as input - it doesn't necessarily 
need to be one that came with fortune.

<snip>

> the fortune program apparently allows the random selection, though i 
> gather that it is a pretty long distance between two points to do 
> something like add a new quote to the list

Nah, it's pretty straightforward.

>  -- apparently a script needs
> to be then run to tell the fortune program to include the new quote in 
> the mix.

Yup. That's what strfile does. I have two files:

/home/jvoigt/misc/fortunes (actual name doesn't matter)

which is the text-editable file containing the fortunes I want to use, and the 
second:

/home/jvoigt/misc/fortunes.dat

which is the data file that fortune itself uses. Any time I add a new quote to 
the first file, I just run:

~> strfile -ir fortunes fortunes.dat

to recreate the data file so fortune will pick up the new quote(s) next time it 
runs. To generate a random quote from fortunes.dat, I included:

/usr/bin/fortune /home/jvoigt/fortunes >> ~/.signature (without the .dat) at the 
end of my .siggen script. The script actually generates two files .signature and 
.signature2 as I use separate identities in Mozilla for two different accounts.

I hope this makes sense - I'm still on post-holiday recovery ;-)

HTH,

John V.
-- 
   _/- John Voigt - K9GBO -----|- Registered Linux User #38558 --_/
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	Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the
	time he will pick himself up and continue on.