Friday fun with cows and lolcats
Contents
The cow has spoken again, and it’s been very insightful:
Cows are a well known and frequent phenomenon in Unix/Linux world. They’ve also been spotted in many other computerized ecosystems. They’re very happy with MacOS. WSL is okay too. Myself I have even managed to put a talking cow on an Android phone. For those still unfamiliar with it, here are the necessary ingredients:
- fortune - a program displaying random messages from a vast database of quotations
- cowsay - a program which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message
- lolcat - ruby script which adds rainbow colors to the piped output
You can install these utilities with package manager of your choice, i.e.
brew install fortune cowsay lolcat
or
sudo apt install fortune cowsay lolcat
Now try and pipe them together. When bored, piping random programs and seeing what happens can be an endless source of amusement on Linux. So, when I pipe-connect these three:
fortune | cowsay | lolcat
this is what happens:
For convenience, I have defined an alias in my bash profile:
alias cow="clear; fortune | cowsay | lolcat"
and now, when I need some inspiration, I just say:
cow
which is promptly responded by:
Have a great weekend with terminal!
Author Tomasz Waraksa
LastMod 2021-01-22
© Tomasz Waraksa, letsdebug.it
Disclaimer
This article is not promoting any of the described products, services or vendors. We don't have any commercial interest nor associations with them. We're not trying to suggest that these products or services are best for you, nor promising that your experience will be the same.
In no event will we be liable for any loss or damage including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage, or any loss or damage whatsoever arising from loss of data or profits arising out of, or in connection with, the use of this website and any information presented on it.
Through this website you are able to link to other websites which are not under our control. We have no control over the nature, content and availability of those sites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.
Software License
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of software published on this website and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions, unless stated explicitly otherwise:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.