Original author(s) | Tony Monroe |
---|---|
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | Perl |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Available in | English |
License | Artistic License / GNU General Public License |
Website | http://nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml (archived) |
cowsay is a program that generates ASCII art pictures of a cow with a message. [2] 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. [3] 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. [4]
The Unix command fortune can also be piped into the cowsay command:
[user@hostname ~]$ fortune|cowsay ________________________________________/ You have Egyptian flu: you're going to \\ be a mummy. / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||
Using the parameter -f followed by tux, one can replace the cow with other beings, such as Tux, the Linux mascot:
[user@hostname ~]$ fortune|cowsay-ftux _________________________________________/ You are only young once, but you can \\ stay immature indefinitely. / ----------------------------------------- \ \ .--. |o_o | |:_/ | // \ \ (| | ) /'\_ _/`\ \___)=(___/
Using the parameter -l shows all available cow files:
[user@hostname ~]$ cowsay-l Cow files in /usr/share/cowsay/cows:apt beavis.zen bong bud-frogs bunny calvin cheese cock cower daemon defaultdragon dragon-and-cow duck elephant elephant-in-snake eyes flaming-sheepghostbusters gnu head-in hellokitty kiss kitty koala kosh luke-koalamech-and-cow meow milk moofasa moose mutilated pony pony-smaller ren sheepskeleton snowman sodomized-sheep stegosaurus stimpy suse three-eyes turkeyturtle tux unipony unipony-smaller vader vader-koala www
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, plus a descending U to represent an extruded tongue, also used on Linux kernel oops. |
-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). [5] |
-T tongue_string | Manually specifies the cow′s tongue shape, e.g. cowsay -T \(\) for a pair of parentheses. [5] |
-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. |
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