fortune is a program from the early days of UNIX that produces fortune cookies.
The first version appears 1979 in Unix Version 7.
jfortune is a rewrite of the program in Java which can be defined as dependency for your own Java application.
The first version of jfortune was written in 2003 with Java 1.4, JUnit 3 and Ant.
It is now digged out, put on GitHub and delivered as v0.3 to the Central Maven Repo (OSSRH-36625).
With v0.5 this version was reworked, adapted to Java 8 and a command line interface added. This version contains more fortunes but is not compatible with v0.3.
The input files for the embedded fortunes is a small selection from fortune-mod, fortunes-de and fortunes-es which are delivered with Ubuntu.
- Project page: http://javatux.de/jfortune/
- Changelog
- Javadoc: http://javatux.de/jfortune/apidocs/index.html
- Development: src/main/asciidoc/README
- SBOM: src/main/asciidoc/SBOM
February 2026, Oli B.