cowsay - A Configurable Speaking/Thinking Cow

cowsay is a silly little command line text filter that displays a cow saying (or thinking) whatever text you feed it.  For example, each time I log into my server via ssh I am greeted by a friendly cow who gives me a random quote.

cowsay has a number of options that change how the text is displayed and the appearance of the cow (dead, greedy, paranoid, etc.).  There is also a library of "cowfiles" - alternate pictures that can be displayed in place of the cow.

Some of the options available:

The -n option turns off word wrap. If it is specified, the given message will not be word wrapped.

The  -W specifies roughly (where the message should be wrapped.  The default is equivalent to -W 40 i.e. wrap words at or before the 40th column.

There  are  several  provided modes which change the appearance of the cow depending on its particular emotional/physical state.
The -b option initiates Borg mode;
       -d causes the cow to appear dead;
       -g invokes greedy mode;
       -p causes a state of paranoia to come over the cow;
       -s makes the cow appear thoroughly stoned;
       -t yields a tired cow;
       -w is somewhat the opposite of -t, and initiates wired mode;
       -y brings on the cow's youthful appearance.
The -f option  specifies  a particular cow picture file (``cowfile'') to use.
The -l option lists all the cowfiles available

Making the cow say what you want is easy: cowsay moo displays a cow saying "moo".  You can also "pipe" the text to be displayed, like this: echo moo | cowsay .  To display a dragon saying the content of a text file called cowtext, enter cat ~/cowtext | cowsay -f dragon


Installing cowsay

If cowsay isn't already installed in your distribution, installing cowsay is a snap.  Almost all distros include cowsay in their repositories, so its a simple matter of installing via your distro's package manager. (apt/Synaptic, yum, pacman, YasT, etc.)

In the event you can't find a cowsay package for your flavor of Linux, you can download the source tarball from http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay-3.03.tar.gz and build cowsay from source.

Cowsay Homepage: http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml