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>]
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,
15 word-wraps the message given at about 40 columns, and prints the cow
16 saying 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
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.
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 If the program is invoked as cowthink then the cow will think its
33 message instead of saying it.
34
36 There are several provided modes which change the appearance of the cow
37 depending on its particular emotional/physical state.
38 -b
40 Invokes Borg mode.
41 -d
43 Causes the cow to appear dead.
44 -g
46 Invokes greedy mode.
47 -p
49 Causes a state of paranoia to come over the cow.
50 -s
52 Makes the cow appear thoroughly stoned.
53 -t
55 Yields a tired cow.
56 -w
58 Is somewhat the opposite of -t, and initiates wired mode.
59 -y
61 Brings on the cow’s youthful appearance.
62 -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.
71 -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.
80 -r
82 Chooses a random cow from the cows on the COWPATH.
83 -C
85 Enables true-color (24-bit) cows. Currently only has an effect when
86 used in conjunction with -r.
87 -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.
94 -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.
113 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.
119
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.
124 %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.
131 %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.
142
144 Cowsay is maintained by Andrew Janke (floss@apjanke.net).
145 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
152 Main web site: http://cowsay.diamonds
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156 fortune(1), perl(1), wall(1), nwrite(1), figlet(6)
157Cowsay 3.7.0 05/28/2020 COWSAY(1)