On every machine I operate, I put

> fortune | cowsay

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.

    -----------------------------------------
    < pg says 'What problem does this solve?' >
     -----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

If you have this installed on your system and run an Ansible playbook, all the playbook logging will be automatically piped through cowsay.

I'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's hard to miss the script having completed this way

I use this very often with my kids (3yo twins). It'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. 'gnu' or 'fox' they can type themselves.

For fans of neofetch, you can replace the OS logo with a cowsay animal.

  neofetch --ascii "$(fortune | cowsay -W 25)"

   __________________________    ...@fedora 
  / Q. Why is this so        \   ----------------- 
  | clumsy? A. The trick is  |   OS: Fedora Linux 39 (KDE Plasma) x86_64 
  | to use Perl'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 
  | <8225@jpl-devvax.JPL.NAS |   Resolution: 2256x1504 
  \ A.GOV>                   /   DE: Plasma 5.27.10 
   --------------------------    WM: kwin 
          \   ^__^               Theme: [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3] 
           \  (oo)\_______       Icons: [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3] 
              (__)\       )\/\   Terminal: konsole 
                  ||----w |      CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7640U w/ Radeon 760M Graphics (12) @ 4.971GHz 
                  ||     ||      GPU: AMD ATI c1:00.0 Phoenix1 
                                 Memory: 4702MiB / 27742MiB

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'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 https://github.com/tnalpgge/rank-amateur-cowsay/blob/master/...

> fortune | cowsay

Definitely be careful about using fortune in a corporate environment or public space if you don't know what dat files you are using or you might just get an extremely unwelcome surprise.

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.

Kudos to brew for keeping unsuspecting people safe

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/3fb3c4c3e55...

Cowsay was one of the first "hacky show your friends" command.

I still use it when I want to impress someone.

I've been using this a lot. Check this out:

$ fortune | figlet | cowsay -n -f tux

or

$ fortune | cowsay -n -f dragon

even this!

$ 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's a bit weird finding `cowsay -f sodomized` though lol