games

[RW]

On Tue, 13 May 2014 00:24:23 +0200
Rolf Nielsen wrote:

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> On 2014-05-12 22:05, Fbsd8 wrote:
> > I remember back in 6.x a lot of talk about killing every thing
> > about games. Todays version of the handbook has no mention of
> > games, but the bsdinstall installer has option to install games and
> > there is a ports collection category called games. bsdconfig has no
> > games installer.
> > 
> > So what is the general status of games? Is the handbook correct and
> > bsdinstall and the ports collection just never got cleaned up or
> > does the handbook need a chapter on games?
> 
> I'm not sure about the games that come (or used to come) as (an
> optional) part of the system, because I have WITHOUT_GAMES=yes in my
> /etc/src.conf. However, the fact that that setting causes no errors or
> warnings and that it's still documented in the src.conf(5) man page,
> suggests that they're still there, at least when building from source.

/usr/games/random is used by the ports system for RANDOMIZE_MASTER_SITES

There aren't really any actual games as such left. It's fortune, which
provides admin tips on login, and a handful of small utilities - which
have presumably been left because they may be in use in shell scripts,
things like prime, factor, rot13, random etc.

I find random(6) to be particularly useful, especially in the form:
"random -f -", which randomizes the order of lines in a pipeline.