Ok - so you'll all get a good laugh out of this...

Has anyone seen the fortune message that says:

- thing is it seems to have a control character embedded which sends my terminal crazy. Hitting control-c fixed it but it gave me a fright alright.

Just a warning to anyone who comes across this. O.K. I think it's funny now but I didn't at the time....

Don't panic
Are you sure about the control character, though ?
This message come from the line #10131 in /usr/share/games/fortunes/fortunes
(I don't see any weird char)

You're not the only one bgeddy. That one scared the shit out of me too first time I saw it.

Well it made my terminal look like this as if a single quote or something had been entered
Even finding the fortune with caused the same weird terminal behaviour. This only happens when running in VirtualBox - I've just tried and my host machine running Slackware 12 doesn't do this --very strange.


edit: Just booted up the VM again and now fortune -m panic* doesn't cause the strange behavior - just my luck - perhaps some unfortunate coincidence ?
Suffice to say this added to the "entertainment" value !!

I had never seen this line, but have seen the next one in the list:
It baffled me when I saw it and started searching on Google what it could be... and found out that it was a fortune message.

I might disable the fortunes - I mean what's next maybe

That would be no fun at all !

It gave me a moments pause when I first saw it, but then I asked the question:
"What the hell did you boot from then?"
and suddenly woke up to the joke.

Yeah - I thought that but the wierd > > > prompts gave me a double scare !

lol, I love these kind of fortune jokes It's even funnier because it tends to happen more often to people new to Linux, and then they ask on here. It has happened on several occasions, just search for it.

They can be quite spooky at times. I had an Arthur C. Clarke quote pop up one morning, and when I fired up my web browser to look at the days News, I found an article saying he'd died!

Well whilst I'm no veteran with Linux I have been using it full time for over three years and Unix for longer - I still got a shock.

I didn't think the fortune writers had this kind of sense of humor - evil b******ds!

I know you can enable offensive fortunes - just curious what this is classed as?

Seriously though I can see the funny side - just glad I was alone when I had my "little surprise". The language was quite choice..

GazL - thats weird. Lets hope one day you get six numbers pop up.

One that still spooks me occasionally is "segmentation fault - core dumped"

That's evil too..

That's it - just ignore all messages ....
Oh just ignore it - those fortune boys like having a laugh !!

Hah, you wish you could ignore that one, but in that case it won't boot, so you know it can't be fortune.

Well I never was spooked by fortune. BTW, I don't get it: Normally you see fortunes only after you login into console manually. How can you be spooked by it? It's quite clear that it's not kernel output or something.

fortune is a script, it doesn't execute commands. So there is nothing to worry about.

"Offensive fortunes" have limericks, political, religious jokes, sex/gender-related jokes (gender-related means "male" and "female" way of thinking, blondes, etc), jokes about famous people, few mentions of drugs and mild swearing. This isn't as bad as it sounds, because (to my taste) most "offensive" stuff is either funny or silly and chance of being deeply offended is about 1/1000 (but that's for me). I think most of those jokes were marked as offensive because some people get offended too easily. I don't think anyone will get really pissed off by some of "fortune -o" phrases, but that's unless that person is really fanatical about some aspect of life (religion, politics, etc).