cowsay

cowsay

Original author(s)	Tony Monroe
Stable release	3.03 / May 28, 2000
Written in	Perl
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
License	Artistic License / GNU General Public License
Website	www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml

cowsay is a program which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures using pre-made images of other animals. There is also a related program called cowthink, with cows with thought bubbles rather than speech bubbles.

  _______________________ 
 < Typical cowsay output! >
  ----------------------- 
         \   ^__^
          \  (oo)\_______
             (__)\       )\/\
                 ||----w |
                 ||     ||

.cow files for Cowsay exist which are able to produce different variants of "cows", with different kinds of "eyes", and so forth. It is sometimes used on IRC, desktop screenshots, and in software documentation. It is more or less a joke within hacker culture, but has been around long enough that its use is rather widespread. In 2007 it was highlighted as a Debian package of the day.

Cowsay is written in the Perl programming language, and as such is easily adaptable to system tasks in Unix, such as telling users their home directories are full, they have new mail, et cetera. Additionally, it is quite adaptable to the Common Gateway Interface.

Example

The Unix command fortune can also be piped into the cowsay command:

baldur@baldur-desktop:~$ fortune | cowsay
 ________________________________________
/ You have Egyptian flu: you're going to \
\ be a mummy.                            /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

And using the parameter -f followed by tux, one can exchange the cow with Tux, the Linux mascot:

baldur@baldur-desktop:~$ fortune | cowsay -f tux
 _________________________________________
/ You are only young once, but you can    \
\ stay immature indefinitely.             /
 -----------------------------------------
   \
    \
        .--.
       |o_o |
       |:_/ |
      //   \ \
     (|     | )
    /'\_   _/`\
    \___)=(___/

Parameters

Option	Purpose
-n	Disables word wrap, allowing the cow to speak FIGlet or to display other embedded ASCII art. Width in columns becomes that of the longest line, ignoring any value of -W
-W	Specifies width of the speech balloon in columns, i.e. characters in a monospace font. Default value is 40.
-b	“Borg mode”, uses == in place of oo for the cow′s eyes.
-d	“Dead”, uses XX.
-g	“Greedy”, uses $$.
-p	“Paranoid”, uses @@.
-s	“Stoned”, uses ** to represent bloodshot eyes, plus a descending U to represent an extruded tongue.
-t	“Tired”, uses --.
-w	“Wired”, uses OO.
-y	“Youthful”, uses .. to represent smaller eyes.
-e eye_string	Manually specifies the cow′s eye-type, e.g. cowsay -e ^^ (see Eastern-style emoticon).
-T tongue_string	Manually specifies the cow′s tongue shape, e.g. cowsay -T \(\) for a pair of parentheses.
-f cowfile	Specifies a .cow file from which to load alternative ASCII art. Accepts both absolute file-paths and those relative to the environment variable COWPATH.
-l	Lists the names of available cow-files in the COWPATH directory instead of displaying a quote.

List all forms

On Linux/Unix you can list all the available forms of cowsay beasts using this command:

cowsay -l | grep -v "^Cow" | sed -e "s% %\n%g" | sed -e "s%\(.*\)%cowsay -f \1 Now I am a \1%" | sh | less

External links

• Cowsay distribution
• Cowsay in Linux Kernel
• CGI frontend to Cowsay
• Another web frontend to Cowsay
• Graphical cowsay for X Window system
• Cowsay for Android