1COWSAY(1) Cowsay Manual COWSAY(1)
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6 cowsay, cowthink - configurable speaking/thinking cow (and a bit more)
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9 cowsay [-e eye_string] [-f cowfile | -r [-C] ] [-h] [-l] [-n] [-T
10 tongue_string] [-W column] [-bdgpstwy] [<message>]
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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,
15 word-wraps the message given at about 40 columns, and prints the cow
16 saying the given message on standard output.
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18 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
20 word-wrapped. This is possibly useful if you want to make the cow think
21 or speak in figlet(6). If -n is specified, there must not be any
22 command line arguments left after all the switches have been processed.
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24 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).
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28 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.
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32 If the program is invoked as cowthink then the cow will think its
33 message instead of saying it.
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36 There are several provided modes which change the appearance of the cow
37 depending on its particular emotional/physical state.
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39 -b
40 Invokes Borg mode.
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42 -d
43 Causes the cow to appear dead.
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45 -g
46 Invokes greedy mode.
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48 -p
49 Causes a state of paranoia to come over the cow.
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51 -s
52 Makes the cow appear thoroughly stoned.
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54 -t
55 Yields a tired cow.
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57 -w
58 Is somewhat the opposite of -t, and initiates wired mode.
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60 -y
61 Brings on the cow’s youthful appearance.
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63 -e
64 Selects the appearance of the cow’s eyes, in which case the first
65 two characters of the argument string eye_string will be used. The
66 default eyes are oo. The tongue is similarly configurable through
67 -T and tongue_string; it must be two characters and does not appear
68 by default. However, it does appear in the dead and stoned modes.
69 Any configuration done by -e and -T will be lost if one of the
70 provided modes is used.
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72 -f
73 Specifies a particular cow picture file (cowfile) to use. If the
74 cowfile spec resolves to an existing file, then it will be
75 interpreted as a path to the cowfile. Otherwise, cowsay will search
76 the COWPATH for a cowfile with that name. Additional cowpath
77 entries may be specified in the COWPATH environment variable. To
78 list all cowfiles on the current COWPATH, invoke cowsay with the -l
79 switch.
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81 -r
82 Chooses a random cow from the cows on the COWPATH.
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84 -C
85 Enables true-color (24-bit) cows. Currently only has an effect when
86 used in conjunction with -r.
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88 -l
89 Lists the defined cows on the current COWPATH. Displays it in a
90 human-readable pretty-printed format when displaying to a terminal
91 device. When sent to a non-terminal device, outputs the list in a
92 parsing-friendly format with one cow name per line and no headers
93 or blank lines.
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95 -h
96 Displays a help screen.
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99 A cowfile is made up of a simple block of perl(1) code, which assigns a
100 picture of a cow to the variable $the_cow. Should you wish to customize
101 the eyes or the tongue of the cow, then the variables $eyes and $tongue
102 may be used. The trail leading up to the cow’s message balloon is
103 composed of the character(s) in the $thoughts variable. Any backslashes
104 must be reduplicated to prevent interpretation. Also, at-signs ("@")
105 must be backslashed because that is what Perl 5 expects. The name of a
106 cowfile must end with .cow, otherwise it is not recognized as a
107 cowfile.
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110 The COWPATH environment variable, if present, will be used to search
111 for cowfiles. It contains a colon-separated list of directories, much
112 like PATH or MANPATH.
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114 The default COWPATH is searched after entries in the user-specified
115 COWPATH environment variable. To suppress this behavior (e.g. for
116 development work), set the COWSAY_ONLY_COWPATH environment variable to
117 1. In this case, COWPATH should contain at least a directory with a
118 file called default.cow in it.
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121 %PREFIX%/share/cowsay/cows holds a sample set of cowfiles. Your COWPATH
122 automatically contains this directory, unless COWSAY_ONLY_COWPATH is
123 set to 1.
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125 %PREFIX%/share/cowsay/site-cows is provided for administrators to
126 install custom cows. Cows in share/cowsay/site-cows take precedence
127 over cows with the same name in share/cowsay/cows. The site-cows
128 directory will never be modified by cowsay installations, so custom
129 cows defined there will persist across upgrades of cowsay. site-cows is
130 also on the default COWPATH.
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132 %PREFIX%/etc/cowsay/cowpath.d/ (or /etc/cowsay/cowpath.d/ when %PREFIX%
133 is /usr) is a directory that contains files which list entries to be
134 added to the default COWPATH. This mechanism allows third-party cow
135 collections to register themselves with cowsay in a way that does not
136 require per-user configuration.
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139 If there are any, please report them on the cowsay GitHub page
140 (https://github.com/cowsay-org/cowsay/issues) or notify the author at
141 the address below.
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144 Cowsay is maintained by Andrew Janke (floss@apjanke.net).
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146 Cowsay was originally written by Tony Monroe (tony@nog.net), with
147 suggestions from Shannon Appel (appel@csua.berkeley.edu) and
148 contributions from Anthony Polito (aspolito@csua.berkeley.edu).
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151 GitHub: https://github.com/cowsay-org/cowsay
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153 Main web site: http://cowsay.diamonds
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156 fortune(1), perl(1), wall(1), nwrite(1), figlet(6)
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160Cowsay 3.7.0 05/28/2020 COWSAY(1)