1cowsay(1) General Commands Manual cowsay(1)
2
6 cowsay/cowthink - configurable speaking/thinking cow (and a bit more)
7
9 cowsay [-e eye_string] [-f cowfile] [-h] [-l] [-n] [-T tongue_string]
10 [-W column] [-bdgpstwy]
11
13 Cowsay generates an ASCII picture of a cow saying something provided by
14 the user. If run with no arguments, it accepts standard input, word-
15 wraps the message given at about 40 columns, and prints the cow saying
16 the given message on standard output.
17 To aid in the use of arbitrary messages with arbitrary whitespace, use
19 the -n option. If it is specified, the given message will not be word-
20 wrapped. This is possibly useful if you want to make the cow think or
21 speak in figlet(6). If -n is specified, there must not be any command-
22 line arguments left after all the switches have been processed.
23 The -W specifies roughly (where the message should be wrapped. The
25 default is equivalent to -W 40 i.e. wrap words at or before the 40th
26 column.
27 If any command-line arguments are left over after all switches have
29 been processed, they become the cow's message. The program will not
30 accept standard input for a message in this case.
31 There are several provided modes which change the appearance of the cow
33 depending on its particular emotional/physical state. The -b option
34 initiates Borg mode; -d causes the cow to appear dead; -g invokes
35 greedy mode; -p causes a state of paranoia to come over the cow; -s
36 makes the cow appear thoroughly stoned; -t yields a tired cow; -w is
37 somewhat the opposite of -t, and initiates wired mode; -y brings on the
38 cow's youthful appearance.
39 The user may specify the -e option to select the appearance of the
41 cow's eyes, in which case the first two characters of the argument
42 string eye_string will be used. The default eyes are 'oo'. The tongue
43 is similarly configurable through -T and tongue_string; it must be two
44 characters and does not appear by default. However, it does appear in
45 the 'dead' and 'stoned' modes. Any configuration done by -e and -T
46 will be lost if one of the provided modes is used.
47 The -f option specifies a particular cow picture file (``cowfile'') to
49 use. If the cowfile spec contains '/' then it will be interpreted as a
50 path relative to the current directory. Otherwise, cowsay will search
51 the path specified in the COWPATH environment variable. To list all
52 cowfiles on the current COWPATH, invoke cowsay with the -l switch.
53 If the program is invoked as cowthink then the cow will think its mes‐
55 sage instead of saying it.
56
58 A cowfile is made up of a simple block of perl(1) code, which assigns a
59 picture of a cow to the variable $the_cow. Should you wish to custom‐
60 ize the eyes or the tongue of the cow, then the variables $eyes and
61 $tongue may be used. The trail leading up to the cow's message balloon
62 is composed of the character(s) in the $thoughts variable. Any back‐
63 slashes must be reduplicated to prevent interpolation. The name of a
64 cowfile should end with .cow, otherwise it is assumed not to be a cow‐
65 file. Also, at-signs (``@'') must be backslashed because that is what
66 Perl 5 expects.
67
69 What older versions? :-)
70 Version 3.x is fully backward-compatible with 2.x versions. If you're
72 still using a 1.x version, consider upgrading. And tell me where you
73 got the older versions, since I didn't exactly put them up for world-
74 wide access.
75 Oh, just so you know, this manual page documents version 3.02 of
77 cowsay.
78
80 The COWPATH environment variable, if present, will be used to search
81 for cowfiles. It contains a colon-separated list of directories, much
82 like PATH or MANPATH. It should always contain the /usr/share/cowsay
83 directory, or at least a directory with a file called default.cow in
84 it.
85
87 /usr/share/cowsay holds a sample set of cowfiles. If your COWPATH is
88 not explicitly set, it automatically contains this directory.
89
91 If there are any, please notify the author at the address below.
92
94 Tony Monroe (tony@nog.net), with suggestions from Shannon Appel
95 (appel@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU) and contributions from Anthony Polito
96 (aspolito@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU).
97
99 perl(1), wall(1), nwrite(1), figlet(6)
100 $Date$ cowsay(1)