fortune for Windows Powershell

It is always preferable to visit home with a friend.  Your parents will
not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves
and because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like
mature human beings ...
		-- Playboy, January 1983

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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