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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

On every machine I operate, I put

> fortune | cowsay

in to my .bashrc. Every time I open a new terminal I get a cow telling me a fortune. I have done this for about 10 years now and it just feels right.

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Mine is very similar (fortune -c | cowsay -f tux)

I don't think I've ever seen a cookie repeat in over 10 years, but it might just be my poor memory

The default data file[1] contains 500kB of plaintext fortunes, this seems plausible.

[1]: http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/games/fortune/datfiles/fortunes

I do the exact same but I prefer the turtle to the default (https://github.com/schacon/cowsay/blob/master/cows/turtle.co...)

It caused questions sometimes when I had to open a new terminal in a demo with the team.

I know a guy who got fired for doing this.

I’d wager there was more going on than just this. He was under performing, or failing in some other way and this was just the excuse to get rid of him.

Well that doesn't seem reasonable or a valid excuse for firing someone (or at least in places with a minimum of employee protection). What problem does it cause if you customise your shell prompt?

I used to send fortune to a printer display. It did backfire as some of the fortune quotes can be offensive if they get cut-off by the display. Flags are required to do the true one-liners. Nobody actually got upset as much more offensive things were shouted across the room daily [1] but leadership suggested it should be avoided.

[1] - The Oracle system pw was intentionally as offensive as it could be and people would forget it on purpose so it could be shouted across the room. I have good memories of that place. It was laid back and the people were fun. It was acquired and parted out by a bank.

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