Make the terminal more lively and interesting - use the Linux cowsay command to complain

For most people, using the Linux terminal is a very boring thing. However, have you ever thought about adding some interesting elements to your terminal? Today, we will introduce a command called cowsay, which can make your terminal more interesting and vivid.

Celebrate the holidays with this fun Linux command line tool.

You may have heard of a small program that accepts input information (such as a message you enter via the keyboard) and outputs an image of a cow that references the input message. This little program is called cowsay, and we've introduced it before.

So, in order to do something fun, I wanted to use it to celebrate Día de los Muertos (LCTT translation: the traditional Mexican ghost festival, the famous animated film "Coco" is the setting for this) .

In addition to cows, there are actually some other images available. When cowsay is installed, the program automatically installs several other images and stores them in the /user/share/cowsay directory. You can use the -l parameter to get a list of images.

$ sudo dnf install cowsay
$ cowsay -l

There is actually a lot of development activity related to cowsay or similar programs. You can create your own image files or download images made by others. For example, Charc0al’s cowsay file converter is available on GitHub. You can use this tool to convert your own images into the special ASCII format required by cowsay. Depending on your Linux or FreeBSD terminal setup, you may have color support enabled and cowsay can also display color images. Charc0al's converter also provides many ready-made color files.

I chose the "Beetlejuice" (LCTT translation: the Archmage, the protagonist in the American fantasy comedy film of the same name) file to carry out my "celebration". First, I saved the beetlejuice.cow file to the /usr/share/cowsay directory. The permissions of this directory belong to the root user. You can save the file to your home directory first and then copy it there. In addition, we also need to give read permission to the file to all users.

$ sudo cp beetlejuice.cow /usr/share/cowsay
$ sudo chmod o+r /usr/share/cowsay/beetlejuice.cow

Pay attention to how the image is generated (the process is interesting). First set the various ASCII color control codes as variables, and then use these variables to draw the image in traditional ASCII art style. The resulting image was almost full body and didn't fit the height of my terminal without scrolling the screen, so I edited the file and removed the last 15 lines to lower the height.

This image can also be detected by the cowsay program and displayed in the list.

$ cowsay -l
Cow files in /usr/share/cowsay:
beavis.zen beetlejuice blowfish bud-frogs bunny cheese cower default dragon
...

Now, just run the program and specify the image using the -f option. Don't forget to provide the information to be output.

$ cowsay -f beetlejuice "Happy Day of the Dead!"

"Beetlejuice" wishes you a Happy Day of the Dead (CC BY-SA 4.0)

cowsay is an interesting and quirky gadget in Linux. Get creative and explore cowsay and the art of ASCII.

Through the introduction of this article, you have mastered the basic usage of the cowsay command, and learned how to use different pictures and text to generate unique complaints. Making the terminal full of fun and no longer boring, this is the charm that cowsay brings to us. Act quickly and make your terminal lively and interesting!

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