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From: <svartsjel AT gmx DOT net>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: fortune & strfile [autarkic or not]
Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 20:03:00 +0200
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Message-ID: <761876129.20040512200300@gmx.de>
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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


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