Cowsay
program that generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message
cowsay is a program that generates ASCII art pictures of a cow with a message. It can also generate pictures using pre-made images of other animals, such as Tux the Penguin, the Linux mascot. It is written in Perl. There is also a related program called cowthink, with cows with thought bubbles rather than speech bubbles. .cow files for 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, desktop screenshots, 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. In 2007, it was highlighted as a Debian package of the day.
Example
The Unix command fortune can also be piped into the cowsay command:
Using the parameter -f followed by tux, one can replace the cow with other beings, such as Tux, the Linux mascot:
Using the parameter -l shows all available cow files:
Parameters
References
Further reading
Sandra Henry-Stocker (Dec 15, 2020). "Creating your own cowsay messenger".
The public source identifies “Cowsay” as program that generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cowsay, program and generates.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1050444. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cowsay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.