African violet:Such worth is rare

July 23, 2006 12:17 PM

Anyone know the history and/or purpose behind /usr/share/misc/flowers ?

The file appears to exist in some versions of BSD. It is a list of flowers and their meanings.

posted by gwint to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Well, there were a lot of small book/pamphlets on that same topic published in the early Victorian era (mid-19th century.) It's the 'language of flowers' idea and there are many copies of lists with no attribution online; thing is, the authors of those pamphlets were pretty much going with common consensus, mythological allusion to the same plant or flower, or whatever they made up at the time.

The Wikipedia article is pretty poor, but it links to a better history of the practise. It's more an artistic idea than anything really put intp practise - more written about than used, and most likely never used for complex messages except as an experiment.
posted by cobaltnine at 12:25 PM on July 23, 2006

There's a "quiz" game in many distributions which has, among its knowledge bases, some stuff about the meanings of flowers. Maybe that's where the information is stored. (On my system it's in /usr/share/games/quiz.db/flowers.)
posted by hattifattener at 12:27 PM on July 23, 2006

Some versions of /usr/games/quiz will use that list as a database for questions (on preview, hattifattener got it first), and sections of it sometimes turn up in the fortune file; I've also seen occasional tutorials that use it as an example where manipulation of a text file is required (eg creating data structures from a list). I don't know anything about its history, though.
posted by nonane at 12:34 PM on July 23, 2006

Some exciting but sadly incomplete history. The quiz file is seperate. I guess it was useful when calendar(1) reminded some pale skinned hacker about an event they forgot about.
posted by Freaky at 3:57 PM on July 23, 2006

its /usr/share/games/quiz.db/flowers on my system too. interestingly enough, /usr/share/misc/airport has airport codes for most major/semimajor airports in the world. Current as of apparently 1993 ;)
posted by devilsbrigade at 6:43 PM on July 23, 2006