| cowsay | |
| Screenshot Size: | 217px |
| Author: | Tony Monroe |
| Programming Language: | Perl |
| Operating System: | Cross-platform |
| Language: | 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.[1] 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, 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.[2] 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.[3]
The Unix command can also be piped into the command:
Using the parameter followed by, one can replace the cow with other beings, such as Tux, the Linux mascot:
Using the parameter shows all available cow files:
| 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 | 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 for the cow′s eyes. | |
| -d | “Dead”, uses, plus a descending 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 to represent an extruded tongue. | |
| -t | “Tired”, uses . | |
| -w | “Wired”, uses . | |
| -y | “Youthful”, uses to represent smaller eyes. | |
| -e eye_string | Manually specifies the cow′s eye-type, e.g. (see Eastern-style emoticon).[4] | |
| -T tongue_string | Manually specifies the cow′s tongue shape, e.g. 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 . | |
| -l | Lists the names of available cow-files in the directory instead of displaying a quote. | |