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.
Features include:
- 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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