Cowsay

On every machine I operate, I put<p>&gt; fortune | cowsay<p>in to my .bashrc. Every time I open a new terminal I get a cow telling me a fortune. I have done this for about 10 years now and it just feels right.

<p><pre><code> ----------------------------------------- &lt; pg says &#x27;What problem does this solve?&#x27; &gt; ----------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\&#x2F;\ ||----w | || ||</code></pre>

If you have this installed on your system and run an Ansible playbook, all the playbook logging will be automatically piped through cowsay.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why anyone would want to, but you can disable this behavior by setting ANSIBLE_NOCOWS=1

I like putting it at the end of scripts that take a long time, it&#x27;s hard to miss the script having completed this way

I use this very often with my kids (3yo twins). It&#x27;s fun for them to see animals, dragons and other things popping up on the white screen. I usually ask them what they what they want see, prepare it and then let them press on enter to display it. Simpler things e.g. &#x27;gnu&#x27; or &#x27;fox&#x27; they can type themselves.

For fans of neofetch, you can replace the OS logo with a cowsay animal.<p><pre><code> neofetch --ascii &quot;$(fortune | cowsay -W 25)&quot; __________________________ ...@fedora &#x2F; Q. Why is this so \ ----------------- | clumsy? A. The trick is | OS: Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma) x86_64 | to use Perl&#x27;s strengths | Host: Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040Series) A5 | rather than its | Kernel: 6.7.6-200.fc39.x86_64 | weaknesses. | Uptime: 3 hours, 48 mins | | Packages: 3936 (rpm), 50 (flatpak) | -- Larry Wall in | Shell: bash 5.2.26 | &lt;8225@jpl-devvax.JPL.NAS | Resolution: 2256x1504 \ A.GOV&gt; &#x2F; DE: Plasma 5.27.10 -------------------------- WM: kwin \ ^__^ Theme: [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2&#x2F;3] \ (oo)\_______ Icons: [Plasma], breeze [GTK2&#x2F;3] (__)\ )\&#x2F;\ Terminal: konsole ||----w | CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7640U w&#x2F; Radeon 760M Graphics (12) @ 4.971GHz || || GPU: AMD ATI c1:00.0 Phoenix1 Memory: 4702MiB &#x2F; 27742MiB</code></pre>

For more practical use try espeak, I often use it in long running scripts that runs somewhere in background, e.g. it tells me when keyboard get disconnected because of the soldering iron or when it&#x27;s time for dinner, or a pomodoro timer, or reminds me I should turn off IM when I put new work in time tracking app.

Interesting take from the git repo: some files were committed 25years ago ! See by example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tnalpgge&#x2F;rank-amateur-cowsay&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;INSTALL">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tnalpgge&#x2F;rank-amateur-cowsay&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;...</a>

&gt; fortune | cowsay<p>Definitely be careful about using fortune in a corporate environment or public space if you don&#x27;t know what dat files you are using or you might just get an extremely unwelcome surprise.<p>I was practicing a presentation and used to use fortune all the time. I forget exactly what it output but I remember being absolutely mortified about what could have happened if that had popped up during an internal company tech talk.<p>Kudos to brew for keeping unsuspecting people safe<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;homebrew-core&#x2F;commit&#x2F;3fb3c4c3e5507a0d4022ec71a81c2358a0fd6ae1">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;homebrew-core&#x2F;commit&#x2F;3fb3c4c3e55...</a>

Cowsay was one of the first &quot;hacky show your friends&quot; command.<p>I still use it when I want to impress someone.<p>I&#x27;ve been using this a lot. Check this out:<p>$ fortune | figlet | cowsay -n -f tux<p>or<p>$ fortune | cowsay -n -f dragon<p>even this!<p>$ fortune | cowsay -n -f dragon | cowsay -n | cowsay -n -tux

perhaps the only good program ever written?

All the best hackers pipe their script output to cowsay.

It&#x27;s a bit weird finding `cowsay -f sodomized` though lol