Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com X-Authenticated: #624634 From: To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: fortune & strfile [autarkic or not] Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 20:03:00 +0200 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <761876129.20040512200300@gmx.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Hi. Recently, I asked if it was feasible or not to run Cygwin’s fortune separated on any Win32 system. Christopher Faylor was not amused about my question due to a misunderstanding, sorry for that. First, it’s not my aim to "cherry pick" (as to quote Brian Dessent) integral parts of the Cygwin project for any reasons whatsoever. I did hope to hunt down a minor, but rather vexing problem of mine (maybe not the most effective way, but I’m not a programmer after all). Quite a while ago, I decided to set up new fortune quotes of my own. In order to enable fortune to process them, I used strfile for generating the needed DATs. Usually, this is a trivial task: strfile [-io] quotes [quotes.dat] (I once noticed that both -i and -o are worthy for enabling fortune’s -s and -l option, respectively.) One should be able now to invoke fortune like this: fortune [-aeslo] quotes But this time fortune didn’t return a quote, instead I read — nothing. Calling fortune multiple times, once or twice one quote was printed out on screen, this was the first element of the file "quotes". The remaining two hundred quotes or so didn’t show up, often empty lines were given back. I tried it again and again, varying strfile’s arguments "strfile -i file", "strfile -r" etc, I repeated the procedure using quote collections like "linuxcookie", "startrek", "zippy" of the fortune directory and so on, but no workable DATs were written. Strangely enough, using the *original* DATs coming with Cygwin’s fortune release, everything works fine. Now at least I know, that stuffing cygwin1.dll in a directory, bundled with fortune and some of the *original* DATs and quote files, indeed, fortune will work on any Windows system with a DOS prompt. However, strfile will still behave oddly, writing DATs that seem to be faulty somehow. I found a posting of Lee D. Rothstein, also dealing with (different) strfile headaches: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-06/msg00148.html I didn’t check strfile out since then. What's the secret about strfile and those DAT files? Greetings, Mikka -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/