This file is out of date.

This section contains applications which retrieve a random record from a
file of (similar?) records.

The queen of such programs, of course, is fortune.  This version is rather
immoderately enhanced.  The core indexing program (idxstr) permits sorting
on any defined field; defined fields include things like the person to whom
the quote/fortune is attributed, the printed work in which it may be found,
and the like.  This is intended to ease the editing and maintenance of files
of fortunes.

This fortune uses multiple input files.  It makes no distinction between
"offensive" fortunes and ones that are, allegedly, not, because I find that
there is no universal set of criteria on which to base the judgment.  Cave
canem, and if you believe in censorship, please die young.  It can be
configured to use a set (directory) of files or a subset, and the files to
be used are configurable per-user, with the .rc file syntax (e.g.,
.fortunerc), and a site-wide configuration file that users may override.

The major added feature of fortune, though, is the ability to pre-parse
output for a variety of output devices (specifying columns and rows, for
instance, or with HTML tags embedded, and using device characteristics for
emphasis).  This makes it, probably, a more useful version, given the
rapidly improving display capabilities of computers of all sorts.  However,
a prime directive has been to maintain backward compatibility (not with the
index file format, which wasn't very flexible or useful IMO, but with data
file formats, and with standard 80x25 TTY displays).  It is believed that
this version will produce superior results on many different platforms,
without sacrificing the capability to display on older machinery.

randomsig is a common sort of hack; this one is also highly configurable
(that is, it can blend together a file full of quotes with some standard
user information into a pleasing result).  If called from cron, it has much
the same semantics as sigd, which is intended as a grace note for internet
sites providing shell accounts, but will probably be most used by people
with dialup access on Unix machines who have cron access anyway.  It offers
the ability to register with the daemon process, which then periodically
generates a new signature, with preference given to a properly formatted
signatures file in $HOME, but a system-wide backup.  It can be controlled a
bit more rigorously than randomsig can (contents of signatures can't be,
unless you hack it, but CPU spent generating new silliness can be limited,
and without the need to grant access to cron).
