Cowsay English

Introduction

Cowsay is a very important program for any up-and-coming Ubuntu user, important in the way that it can starve off boredom for a few seconds. Cowsay runs on Unix-like operating systems, like Linux. The program can be used by any normal user. Cowsay itself creates an ASCII picture of a cow saying a message the user creates. The program has many functions that let it change the output accordingly, by using specific parameters. Piping outputs of other programs into cowsay is easily doable using the piping command. Cowsay was created by Tony Monroe, in 1999.

Over the years, Cowsay became a joke in the hacker culture and has become widespread enough for normal recognition.

Syntax and Parameters

The average syntax for cowsay consists of:

cowsay (parameter) (message)

Parameters	Functions
-d	Dead cow mode, replaces eyes with X
-g	Scrooge McDuck mode, replaces eyes with $
-p	Tin foil hat mode (without a hat), replaces eyes with @
-b	Borg assimilation mode, turns eyes into ==
-t	Tired cow mode, replaces eyes with --
-s	"Stoned" mode, replaces eyes with *, with an additional tongue
-w	Suprised mode, replaces eyes with O
-y	Young mode, replaces eyes with .
-f cowfile	Used to replace the cow with other possible creatures, like sheep or penguins
-e eye_string	Used to specify the eye string on the cow
-T tongue_string	Used to specify the tounge usage on the cow
-W	used to specify the width of the speech baloons
-n	used to disable line wrap and to create messages with spaces in them

Gallery

• 

  A sheep

• 

  A tiger

• 

  Ghostbusters logo

• 

  Darth Moo

• 

  Beavis

References

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20071030081644/http://debaday.debian.net/2007/10/28/cowsay-a-configurable-talking-and-thinking-cow/

[2] http://textart.io/cowsay

Article created by Meelis Hass in the Spring semester of 2016