I learned on reddit the other day about the sudo “insults” capability where it throws shade at you when you mistype the password. I configured it everywhere I could, but I wanted more, so I came across cowsay and fortune.
$ fortune | cowsay / SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! \ \ POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||
Needless to say… wow.
Anyway so I wanted to get fortune going in my home-automation setup using home-assistant (which is running in a virtualenv) as a quote-of-the-day kind of thing but I kept running into trouble! My setup was:
sensor: - platform: command_line command: "fortune -a -s" scan_interval: 600 name: quote
But I kept getting:
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command 'fortune -a -s' returned non-zero exit status 127
Ugh!
It took me literally forever to realize that the package comes with two utilities that go in /usr/bin: unstr and strfile. These weren’t being found because the virtualenv’s bin folder was taking precedence. Two symlinks later, and I’m up and running!
lrwxrwxrwx 1 hass nogroup 14 Jan 21 22:21 unstr -> /usr/bin/unstr lrwxrwxrwx 1 hass nogroup 16 Jan 21 22:07 strfile -> /usr/bin/strfile
Hope someone else finds this useful.