Cowsay

Hello, bovine world

cowsay on the wiki
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cowsay on the shell
A Debian Package:

Package: cowsay 3.03-5

a configurable talking cow

Turns text into happy ASCII cows, with speech balloons.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/cowsay.html

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue67/orr.html

NAME cowsay/cowthink - configurable speaking/thinking cow (and       a bit more)

SYNOPSIS cowsay [-e eye_string] [-f cowfile] [-h]  [-l]  [-n]  [-T tongue_string] [-W column] [-bdgpstwy]

DESCRIPTION Cowsay generates  an  ASCII picture of a cow saying some- thing provided by the user. If run with no arguments, it       accepts  standard  input,  word-wraps the message given at       about 40 columns, and prints the cow saying the given mes- sage on standard output.

To aid  in  the  use of arbitrary messages with arbitrary whitespace, use the -n option. If it is  specified,  the given message will not be word-wrapped. This is possibly useful if you want to make the  cow  think  or  speak  in       figlet(6). If -n is specified, there must not be any com- mand-line arguments left after all the switches have been processed.

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.

If any  command-line  arguments  are  left over after all switches have been processed, they become the cow's  mes- sage. The program  will not accept standard input for a       message in this case.

There are several provided modes which change the appear- ance  of   the  cow  depending  on  its  particular  emo- tional/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 user  may specify the -e option to select the appear- ance of the cow's eyes, in which case the first two char- acters of  the  argument  string eye_string will be used. The default eyes are 'oo'. The tongue is similarly  con- figurable through  -T  and  tongue_string; it must be two characters and does not appear by default. However, it       does appear in the 'dead' and 'stoned' modes. Any config- uration done by -e and -T will be lost if one of the pro- vided modes is used.

The -f  option  specifies  a  particular cow picture file (``cowfile'') to use. If the cowfile spec  contains  '/' then it will be interpreted as a path relative to the cur- rent directory. Otherwise, cowsay will search  the  path specified in  the  COWPATH environment variable. To list all cowfiles on the current COWPATH, invoke  cowsay  with the -l switch.

If the  program  is invoked as cowthink then the cow will think its message instead of saying it.

COWFILE FORMAT A cowfile is made up of a simple block of  perl(1)  code, which assigns a picture of a cow to the variable $the_cow. Should you wish to customize the eyes or the tongue of the cow, then  the  variables  $eyes and $tongue may be used. The trail leading up to the cow's message balloon is com- posed of the character(s) in the $thoughts variable. Any backslashes must be reduplicated to prevent interpolation. The name  of a cowfile should end with .cow, otherwise it       is assumed not to be a cowfile. Also, at-signs  (``@'') must be backslashed because that is what Perl 5 expects.

COMPATIBILITY WITH OLDER VERSIONS What older versions? :-)

Version 3.x  is  fully  backward-compatible with 2.x ver- sions. If you're still using  a  1.x  version,  consider upgrading. And tell me where you got the older versions, since I didn't exactly put them up for world-wide access.

Oh, just  so you know, this manual page documents version 3.02 of cowsay.

ENVIRONMENT The COWPATH environment variable, if present, will be used to search  for  cowfiles. It contains a colon-separated list of directories, much like PATH or MANPATH. It should always contain the /usr/share/cowsay/cows directory, or at      least a directory with a file called default.cow in it.

FILES /usr/share/cowsay/cows holds a sample set of cowfiles. If      your  COWPATH is not explicitly set, it automatically con- tains this directory.

BUGS If there are any, please notify the author at the address below.

AUTHOR Tony Monroe (tony@nog.net), with suggestions from Shannon Appel (appel@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU)  and  contributions  from Anthony Polito (aspolito@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU).

SEE ALSO perl(1), wall(1), nwrite(1), figlet(6)

$Date: 1999/11/04 19:50:40 $        cowsay(1)

http://www.coost.com/cgi-bin/dwww?type=man&location=/usr/share/man/man1/cowsay.1.gz

man cowsay
cowsay

see also: Figlet