Cowsay

Cowsay is a program which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures of other animals. There is also a related program called cowthink, which cows with thought bubbles rather than voice bubbles (see Comics).

_______________________ < Typical cowsay output! > ----------------------- ^__^ (oo)\_______ (__) )/ ||----w | || ||

Versions of Cowsay exist which are able to produce different variants of cows, with different kinds of eyes , and so forth. It is sometimes used on irc and in software documentation. It is more or less a joke within hacker culture, but has been around long enough that its use is rather widespread.

Cowsay is written in the Perl programming language, and as such is easily adaptable to system tasks in Unix, such as telling users their home directories are full, they have new mail, et cetera. Additionally, it is quite adaptable to the Common Gateway Interface.

= External links =

*[http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml Cowsay distribution] *[http://lxr.linux.no/source/arch/parisc/kernel/traps.cv=2.6.11#L196 Cowsay in Linux Kernel]