Once you save the churchfathers file to your computer run the following command from the terminal in the directory your file is located strfile churchfathers This will create churchfathers.dat If you type fortune /pathtoyourfile/churchfathers A "fortune" in this case a saying from the Church Fathers will be generated at the command line. You can pipe this into other programs such as cowsay or xcowsay. I added to my .zshrc file so every time I start a new terminal I get a saying of a church father. I also created an alias for clear so every time I clear my terminal I get a saying from a church father. You can create a simple script that pipes fortune into xcowsay or notify-file to get a popup in your xwindow session based on either an action or based on a time frame. There is a php version of fortune that allows you to add random sayings to your website. If you want to add more quotes just edit the churchfathers file. Between each quote there should be a single line with a single % Once you are done editing rerun strfile churchfathers to add the additional quotes to the dat file.