Please, please, please request a potentially offensive fortune if and only if you believe, deep down in your heart, that you are willing to be offended. (And that if you are, you'll just quit using -o rather than give us grief about it, okay?)
... 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 a 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-funnywill get you fortunes out of funny two-thirds of the time. The command
fortune 90% funny 10% not-funnywill pick out 90% of its fortunes from funny (the ``10% not-funny'' is unnecessary, since 10% is all that's left). The -e option says to consider all files equal; thus
fortune -eis equivalent to
fortune 50% funny 50% not-funny