The fortune program is a small but important part of the unix culture, and this module aims to provide support for its "fortune cookie" databases to perl programmers.

for efficiency, all versions of fortune rely on a binary header consisting mainly of offsets into the fortune file proper.

modern versions of fortune keep this header in a separate file, and this is the style adopted by the fortune module; the older style of munging the header and data into one large "compiled" file is not (currently) supported.