fortune for Windows Powershell

Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what,
exactly, make people laugh.  That's why they were called "wise men."
All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with
spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about:
Would you please take my wife?  No. How about: Here is my wife, please
take her right now.  No. How about: Would you like to take something?
My wife is available.  No. How about ..."
		-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

Included in many Linux distributions is a fun little program called fortune that prints a random, often amusing message to the screen. If you've ever wanted the same functionality in Windows PowerShell, you've come to the right place!

Installation

1. Download fortune.txt and save it in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\fortune.txt
2. Place the following in your PowerShell profile. In PowerShell, type notepad $profile to edit your profile.

   function fortune {
   	[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText((Split-Path $profile)+'\fortune.txt') -replace "`r`n", "`n" -split "`n%`n" | Get-Random
   }
   
   # Remove the line below if you do not want fortune to run when PowerShell starts
   fortune; echo ''

Using .dat files

This version is much faster on large fortune files. Use this if have a corresponding .dat file for your fortune cookie file generated by strfile. Largely untested, only works properly on UTF-8 files.

function fortune($Path) {
	if(!(Test-Path $Path)) {
		throw "File not found: $path"
	}
	
	$datfile = "$Path.dat"
	if(Test-Path $datfile) {
		$dat = New-Object "System.IO.FileStream" $datfile, 'Open', 'Read', 'Read'
		[byte[]] $dat_bytes = New-Object byte[] 8
		$seek = (Get-Random -Minimum 7 -Maximum ([int]($dat.Length / 4))) * 4
		[void] $dat.Seek($seek, 'Begin')
		[void] $dat.Read($dat_bytes, 0, 8)
		[array]::Reverse($dat_bytes) # Swap endianness
		$start = [BitConverter]::ToInt32($dat_bytes, 4)
		$end = [BitConverter]::ToInt32($dat_bytes, 0)
		$len = $end - $start - 2
		$dat.Close()

		$cookie = New-Object "System.IO.FileStream" $Path, 'Open', 'Read', 'Read'
		[byte[]] $cookie_bytes = New-Object byte[] $len
		[void] $cookie.Seek($start, 'Begin')
		[void] $cookie.Read($cookie_bytes, 0, $len)
		# If you want multiple encodings you'll have to do it yourself
		[System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString($cookie_bytes)
		$cookie.Close()
	} else {
		[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($Path) -replace "`r`n", "`n" -split "`n%`n" | Get-Random
    }
}

Credits

fortune.txt was generated from http://fortunes.cat-v.org/openbsd/.

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