A collection of Korean idioms and their definitions, extracted from Wikiquote, for use with derivatives of the UNIX fortune program.

Summoning random idioms with fortune korean:

$ fortune korean
“우물을 파도 한 우물을 파라”
    어떤 일을 할 때는 한 가지 일을 끝까지 열심히 해야 성공할 수 있다는 뜻.
$ fortune korean
“꿩 대신 닭이다”
    꼭 필요한 것이 없을 때 그와 비슷한 것으로 대신할 수 있다는 뜻.
$ fortune korean
“털도 안 뜯고 먹겠다 한다”
    몹시 성급하게 하려고 덤빈다는 뜻으로, 남의 물건을 통째로 먹으려 할 때도 쓰임.
$ fortune korean
“구렁이 담 넘어가듯 한다”
    일의 끊고 맺음을 확실히 하지않고 슬그머니 얼버무리고 대강 지나갈 경우에 쓰는 말.

Colorful idioms as a fish greeting (fish_greeting.fish):

For use with fortune-mod on Linux, all you need to do is get the files korean and korean.dat into your fortunes directory.

On Fedora, you might use the following commands:

# Install fortune-mod, if you don't have it already
sudo dnf install fortune-mod
# Clone this repo and cd into its directory
git clone https://github.com/maxkapur/korean-fortunes.git
cd korean-fortunes
# Copy the data files into your fortunes source
sudo cp -t /usr/share/games/fortune/ korean korean.dat
# Remove the repo if you don't want it anymore
cd ..
rm -rf korean-fortunes

Or you could symlink from /usr/share/games/fortune/ instead:

# Install fortune-mod, if you don't have it already
sudo dnf install fortune-mod
# Clone this repo and cd into its directory
git clone https://github.com/maxkapur/korean-fortunes.git
cd korean-fortunes
# Symlink the data files into your fortunes source
sudo ln -s (pwd)/korean" /usr/share/games/fortune/korean
sudo ln -s "(pwd)/korean.dat" /usr/share/games/fortune/korean.dat

Now you should see korean listed in your fortune sources:

$ fortune -f
100.00% /usr/share/games/fortune
    ...
     0.55% hitchhiker
     1.21% humorists
     0.92% kids
     3.29% knghtbrd
     1.88% korean           ← success!
     1.26% law
     2.44% linux
     1.60% literat
    ...

Since the fortune source directory differs from distribution to distribution, you may need to modify the commands above to use a directory other than /usr/share/games/fortune/. For example, on Arch, the fortune directory is /usr/share/fortune/, and on Debian it is /usr/share/games/fortunes/ (note the plural). You can figure out what directory your installation uses by running fortune -f.

I use a random Korean fortune as my greeting in the fish shell. The script fish_greeting.fish prints a fortune with a little bit of colorful styling. You can set this as your fish greeting by running, from the korean-fortunes directory

cp fish_greeting.fish ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_greeting.fish

(to copy), or

ln -s "(pwd)/fish_greeting.fish" ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_greeting.fish

(to symlink).

See the src/ directory for the HTML and Javascript used to make the korean fortune file.

• src/index.html is the product of manually removing extraneous elements from the Wikiquote source (doing this with Emmet tools proved a more efficient use of time than scripting them out).
• src/script.js attaches to src/index.html, scans the list into object representations (accounting for the source’s inconsistent formatting), formats the idioms for fortune, and replaces the body contents with a pre element containing the formatted idioms. I then copy-pasted this to the korean file.
• The korean.dat file is created using strfile -c % korean.

MIT license.

By Max Kapur.