Hacker News Reader

Comment by JCWasmx86 | Hacker News Reader

I added "fortune | cowsay -f tux| lolcat" to my ~/.bashrc. It is always nice to see some often inspirational or thought-provoking quote if I open a terminal window.

View on HN

I've ported fortune to Win32, and now have it show me a nice quote whenever I open a Command Prompt. It was feature I always wanted to have, and gave up waiting for MS to provide it.

For me, my first ever experience of fortune was on DEC VMS systems.

Has the cmd on windows an equivalent to .bashrc? If yes - TIL

Yes it does - it's specified via a registry key. I tried to find a reliable page to link to but the best I could find was this:

https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-autoexec.html

Many, many, moons ago Windows NT had support for an 'autoexec.nt' batch file which did the same, so it's not a new feature just horribly undocumented.

It is actually documented in cmd /? .. kinda. cmd's help shows that autorun is disabled with /d, and mentions which keys it looks for.

I use it to have a different prompt for administrator windows.

To anyone using it: Be careful. Any side effects in your autorun script can have entertaining effects on batch files when you least expect it.

To be more precise, besides the warning on SS64 site, check also this:

https://renenyffenegger.ch/notes/Windows/registry/tree/HKEY_...

TLDR is that for /f loops do spawn a child cmd.exe process and you won't like the result (recursiveness).

That's one I hadn't seen before, and would assuredly cause fun.

The common one I've seen surprisingly often is the autorun script doing "cd" and causing for /f loops to break in some way.

Powershell does. Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

Did you publish the port? Can't find any mentions on your website(s).

No. I didn't think there would be any interest tbh. I have 100s of little apps like that which I have never shared...

Thanks for that! I added -a to fortune, so every once in a while (but not always) I get an offensive aphorism -- yes, I am willing to be offended! NOTE: this may require installing the offensive fortunes package.

I once wrote a script to pipe fortune -os into cowsay with random parameters. Unless things have changed in the past six years, cowsay inexplicably has no options to specify to use a random cowfile and randomly choose whether to say or think the aphorism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com