Manual Pages  — FORTUNE

amp;... let us keep in mind the basic governing philosophy
of The Brotherhood, as handsomely summarized in these words:
we believe in healthy, hearty laughter -- at the expense of
the whole human race, if needs be.
Needs be.
                           --H. Allen Smith, "Rude Jokes"

The user may specify alternate sayings. You can specify a specific file, a directory which contains one or more files, or the special word all which says to use all the standard databases. Any of these may be preceded by a percentage, which is a number N between 0 and 100 inclusive, followed by a ‘%’. If it is, there will be an N percent probability that an adage will be picked from that file or directory. If the percentages do not sum to 100, and there are specifications without percentages, the remaining percent will apply to those files and/or directories, in which case the probability of selecting from one of them will be based on their relative sizes.

As an example, given two databases funny and not-funny, with funny twice as big, saying

    fortune funny not-funny

will get you fortunes out of funny two-thirds of the time. The command

    fortune 90% funny 10% not-funny

will pick out 90% of its fortunes from funny (the "10% not-funny" is unnecessary, since 10% is all that is left). The -e option says to consider all files equal; thus

    fortune -e funny not-funny

is equivalent to

    fortune 50% funny 50% not-funny