ccowsay

A C implementation of cowsay. I wanted to write something fun while learning C, and cowsay seemed like a good excuse to mess with text processing and file I/O. It's not trying to replace the original.

what it does

• Text wrapping (configurable width)
• Speech and thought bubbles (cowsay/cowthink)
• Custom eyes and tongue
• Personality modes (borg, dead, greedy, paranoid, stoned, tired, wired, young)
• COWPATH support
• Reads from stdin or args

install

git clone https://github.com/xstread/ccowsay.git
cd ccowsay
make
sudo make install

Installs to /usr/bin, cow files to /usr/local/share/ccowsay/cows.

Uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

usage

ccowsay [options] [message]

If you don't give it a message, it reads from stdin.

options

-f cowfile    Pick a cow (default: default)
-W width      Wrap width (default: 40)
-e eyes       Custom eyes (2 chars, default: oo)
-T tongue     Custom tongue (2 chars)
-n            No wrapping
-l            List cows
-h            Help

modes

-b    Borg (eyes: ==)
-d    Dead (eyes: xx, tongue: U )
-g    Greedy (eyes: $$)
-p    Paranoid (eyes: @@)
-s    Stoned (eyes: **, tongue: U )
-t    Tired (eyes: --)
-w    Wired (eyes: OO)
-y    Young (eyes: ..)

examples

ccowsay "Hello, World!"
ccowsay -f dragon "I am a dragon"
fortune | ccowsay
cowthink "Hmm, interesting..."
cowthink "How cursed are companies today? Age verification??"
ccowsay -d -W 60 "I'm not feeling so good"
ccowsay -l

custom cows

Cow files use three placeholders:

• {{eyes}} - Eye characters
• {{tongue}} - Tongue characters
• {{thoughts}} - \ for speech, o for thoughts

Add custom cows to:

• ./cows/ (local)
• /usr/local/share/ccowsay/cows/ (system)
• Any path in COWPATH (colon separated)

export COWPATH="/path/to/custom/cows:/another/path"

license

See LICENSE file.