It started with a colleague walking by my desk today and asking me if I had ‘cowsays’ installed on my machine, never having heard of it before he dared me to just try run it.\u00a0 A short command not found and a subsequent apt-get install later… I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or slap my forehead.<\/p>\n
\n________________________________________\r\n\/ This is a very very useful and \\\r\n| productive program available in Ubuntu |\r\n\\ and other Debian distributions... \/\r\n ----------------------------------------\r\n \\ ^__^\r\n \\ (oo)\\_______\r\n (__)\\ )\\\/\\\r\n ||----w |\r\n || ||<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
I actually found a legitimate use for it!\u00a0 It just happened that I was supposed to get a thermal printer to work over a RS232 RS485 converter over a Ethernet link all powered from 24V powered by an isolated 110V-24V converter which was fed by 240V…. Yup… Cowsay was the perfect print test material!<\/p>\n
How do you get it?<\/p>\n
sudo apt-get install cowsay<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Usage is pretty self explanatory and the man page, but one nifty feature is that you can replace the cow with a library of animals using the ‘-f<\/em>‘ option.\u00a0 The list of animals is stored in (for Ubuntu<\/a> anyway) in \/usr\/share\/cowsay\/cows\/<\/em><\/p>\n
List of animals…<\/p>\n
\nmadox@madox-laptop:~$ ls \/usr\/share\/cowsay\/cows\/\r\napt.cow elephant-in-snake.cow milk.cow supermilker.cow\r\nbeavis.zen.cow eyes.cow moofasa.cow surgery.cow\r\nbong.cow flaming-sheep.cow moose.cow telebears.cow\r\nbud-frogs.cow ghostbusters.cow mutilated.cow three-eyes.cow\r\nbunny.cow head-in.cow ren.cow turkey.cow\r\ncheese.cow hellokitty.cow satanic.cow turtle.cow\r\ncower.cow kiss.cow sheep.cow tux.cow\r\ndaemon.cow kitty.cow skeleton.cow udder.cow\r\ndefault.cow koala.cow small.cow vader.cow\r\ndragon-and-cow.cow kosh.cow sodomized.cow vader-koala.cow\r\ndragon.cow luke-koala.cow sodomized-sheep.cow www.cow\r\nduck.cow mech-and-cow.cow stegosaurus.cow\r\nelephant.cow meow.cow stimpy.cow<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\nNow you simply use it by typing the following command<\/p>\n
cowsay -f animal whatyouwanttheanimaltosayhere<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The perfect case of a bad<\/strong> example…<\/p>\n
\nmadox@madox-laptop:~$ cowsay -f sodomized WTF? This is sooo wrong...\r\n ____________________________\r\n< WTF? This is sooo wrong... >\r\n ----------------------------\r\n \\ _\r\n \\ (_)\r\n \\ ^__^ \/ \\\r\n \\ (oo)\\_____\/_\\ \\\r\n (__)\\ ) \/\r\n ||----w ((\r\n || ||>><\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\nOk…maybe not so fun…but other more sane selections exist!\u00a0 Tweaks on the animal eyes and more if you explore the man pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It started with a colleague walking by my desk today and asking me if I had ‘cowsays’ installed on my machine, never having heard of it before he dared me to just try run it.\u00a0 A short command not found and a subsequent apt-get install later… I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or … Continue reading “Cowsay? Madoxsay! Fun (or oh so wrong) things in Ubuntu…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[19,18,14],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-cows","tag-fun-software","tag-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.madox.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}