Cowsay


cowsay is a program that generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures using pre-made images of other animals, such as Tux the Penguin, the Linux mascot. It is written in Perl. There is also a related program called cowthink, with cows with thought bubbles rather than speech bubbles. .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.

Example

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

$ fortune | cowsay
________________________________________
/ You have Egyptian flu: you're going to \
\ be a mummy. /
----------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ \_______
\/\
||----w |
|| ||

And using the parameter -f followed by tux, one can replace the cow with other beings, such as Tux, the Linux mascot:

$ fortune | cowsay -f tux
_________________________________________
/ You are only young once, but you can \
\ stay immature indefinitely. /
-----------------------------------------
\
\
.--.
|o_o |
|:_/ |
// \ \

/'\_ _/`\
\___)=\_______/ _________
=; do cowsay -f $i "$i"; done

Once the user has this output they can either pipe:

$ ls | cowsay -f tux
________________________________________
/ ChangeLog cows cowsay cowsay.1 INSTALL \
\ pgp_public_key.txt README Wrap.pm.diff /
----------------------------------------
\
\
.--.
|o_o |
|:_/ |
// \ \

/'\_ _/`\
\___)(___/

Parameters