How to add/remove/edit terminal fortunes

[blendenzo]

I've seen a lot of complaining about the terminal fortunes, and I certainly don't care to start another discussion about whether or not they should be included. For now they are part of Mint, so I've decided to make the best of it.

By now it's common knowledge that you can disable the fortunes by removing the line "/usr/games/fortune" from the /etc/bash.rc file, but since I didn't want to get rid of them completely, I thought I'd find a way to change them. After all, that's the nature of Linux, isn't it? If you don't like it the way it is, change it. I did a quick Google and came across an article from Linux Magazine. Here's the link if you're interested in reading it: Fortune Cookies.pdf

You can add, remove, and edit the fortune lists, download more (like Star Trek quotes or Simpsons quotes or whatever you want), or use them as random email signatures (there is an addon for Thunderbird to do this that is not mentioned in this article). You can even make your own list of fortunes or quotations and generate a library of them for the fortune program to use.

Anyway, hope someone else finds this info useful. I'm off to make my own quotation libraries now.

[Noob Saibot]

I thought this was useful and would like to add some new fortunes to my terminal. However being inexperienced with Linux in general, I could not locate the fortune directory. /usr/games/fortune/ shows not as a directory but an executable file. Could someone kindly guide me to the right directory? TIA.

[Noob Saibot]

/usr/games/share/fortunes/

[Noob Saibot]

whoops /usr/share/games/fortunes/

[Noob Saibot]

That article made it harder than it should be. To add new fortunes to LinuxMint, copy the .dat file and the quotation database to /usr/share/games/fortunes/ no need to create separate directories.