cowsay is a configurable open source program which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message in a speech bubble. cowsay is written in Perl.
cowsay is not limited to generating pictures of cows. It can generate pre-made images of other animals including a duck, elephant, koala, moose, pony, sheep, stegosaurus, and turkey, as well as cheese, snowman, and a skeleton.
There is a related program called cowthink, which generates cows with thought bubbles, as opposed to speech bubbles.
cowsay is generally considered humorous within coders, and was gifted the Debian package of the day in 2007.
Key Features
- Make scripts more interesting.
- Borg mode.
- Ways to alter the way the cow looks, for example making the cow look greedy, paranoid, stoned, tired, wired, youthful and more.
- xcowsay variant available.
Website: www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml
Support: GitHub
Developer: Tony Monroe
License: GNU General Public License / Artistic License
A group of 15 contributors have written a version of cowsay for R. Here’s the GitHub code repository for this project. There’s a version for JavaScript also hosted at GitHub.
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Related Software
| ASCII Art Tools | |
|---|---|
| gif-for-cli | Convert media to animated ASCII art |
| ASCIIQuarium | Embrace marine life from the terminal with beautiful ASCII art |
| Calligraphy | Converts short texts into large, imposing banners |
| CMatrix | Terminal based “The Matrix” |
| Diagon | Transforms markdown-style expression into an ascii-art representation |
| Aewan | Ascii-art Editor Without a Name |
| Steam Locomotive | C program written in 295 lines. It's harmless fun |
| boxes | ASCII box drawing |
| Durdraw | ASCII, Unicode and ANSI art editor |
| FIGlet | Make large letters out of ordinary screen characters |
| pipes.sh | Animated pipes terminal screensaver |
| jp2a | Convert JPEG images to ASCII |
| asciify | Turn images into attractive ASCII art |
| lolcat | Rainbows and unicorns |
| Artem | Convert images to ASCII art |
| TOIlet | Similar in many ways to FIGlet with additional features |
| textdraw | Draw geometric figures and text |
| PyBonsai | Generates procedural ASCII art trees |
| No More Secrets | Recreates the data decryption effect seen in the 1992 film Sneakers |
| Letterpress | Converts your images into a picture made up of ASCII characters |
| ASCII Art Converter | Converts images into ASCII art |
| cbonsai | Generate bonsai trees |
| cadubi | Creative ASCII drawing utility |
| cacafire | Color ASCII Fire |
| cowsay | Generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message in a speech bubble |
| Mezzotone | Convert images into ASCII art |
| img2ascii | Command-line tool for converting images to ASCII art |
| gti | Typo-based curio inspired by Steam Locomotive |
| ctree | Christmas tree on your terminal |
| ASCII Draw | Sketch anything using characters |
| catspeak | Like cowsay but catty |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |