cowsay is a program that generates

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...

pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures using pre-made images of other animals, such as

Tux Black tie is a semi-formal wear, semi-formal Western dress code for evening events, originating in British and American conventions for clothing, attire in the 19th century. In British English, the dress code is often referred to synecdochically ...

the Penguin, the Linux

mascot A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as fi ...

. It is written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. There is also a related program called , with cows with thought bubbles rather than

speech bubbles Speech balloons (also speech bubbles, dialogue balloons, or word balloons) are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comics, and cartoons to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing a charac ...

. .cow files for cowsay exist which are able to produce different variants of "cows", with different kinds of "eyes", and so forth. It is sometimes used on

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

, desktop screenshots, and in

software documentation Software documentation is written text or illustration that accompanies computer software or is embedded in the source code. The documentation either explains how the software operates or how to use it, and may mean different things to people in ...

. It is more or less a joke within

hacker culture The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to a ...

, but has been around long enough that its use is rather widespread. In 2007, it was highlighted as a

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

package of the day.

Example

The Unix command can also be

piped A pipe is a tubular section or hollow cylinder, usually but not necessarily of circular cross-section, used mainly to convey substances which can flow — liquids and gases (fluids), slurries, powders and masses of small solids. It ...

into the command: ser@hostname ~ fortune , cowsay ________________________________________ / You have Egyptian flu: you're going to \ \ be a mummy. / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ , , ----w , , , , , Using the parameter followed by , one can replace the cow with other beings, such as

, the Linux mascot: ser@hostname ~ fortune , cowsay -f tux _________________________________________ / You are only young once, but you can \ \ stay immature indefinitely. / ----------------------------------------- \ \ .--. , o_o , , :_/ , // \ \ (, , ) /'\_ _/`\ \___)=(___/ Using the parameter shows all available cowfiles: ser@hostname ~ cowsay -l Cow files in /usr/share/cowsay/cows: apt beavis.zen bong bud-frogs bunny calvin cheese cock cower daemon default dragon dragon-and-cow duck elephant elephant-in-snake eyes flaming-sheep ghostbusters gnu head-in hellokitty kiss kitty koala kosh luke-koala mech-and-cow meow milk moofasa moose mutilated pony pony-smaller ren sheep skeleton snowman sodomized-sheep stegosaurus stimpy suse three-eyes turkey turtle tux unipony unipony-smaller vader vader-koala www

Parameters

References

External links

* * {{F-Droid, ch.fixme.cowsay ASCII art Free software programmed in Perl Free and open-source Android software Linux software Unix software Cattle in popular culture