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# cowsay

cowsay (Q1050444 on Wikidata) is the name of an old but very fun little program made in 1999 by Tony Monroe. The main idea is that, once a person installs the program, they can make cute ASCII art figures appear with their provided text.

For this program, that should be available at your nearest package manager.

# Making Your Own cowsay

cowsay files are saved as .cow files (eg tux.cow, ghostbusters.cow, moose.cow) on the user's computer, because of that, it is also possible to make your own .cow file, and doing so is rather simple, but you might need to know some basic things...

When rendering in the terminal, if there is only one \, then it will simply not render. To fix this, in the ASCII art, do \\ so for every backslash, there is a second right next to it.

For eyes, $eyes can be inserted so that the user can change them, so it is possible to, say, have dollar signs in place of the normal eyeballs, although this only works if the eyes are actually side-by-side; e.g. the below Bill Gates ASCII would not work as there are spaces between his eyes, but the very below space cow ASCII art would, as there are no spaces between the eyes.

Below is an example of what a cowsay file may look like:

## Bill Gates by Drummyfish, CC0
$the_cow = <<EOC;
$thoughts
 $thoughts
  $thoughts    \\__.,.
   $thoughts -."     "./
     /,/---"""\\\\
     ; __   __ ;
    (=[0 ]"[ 0]=)
    \\| ""._,"" |/
     |  .___,  |
      \\_,   ._/
        "---"
EOC

And when a person runs it in their terminal, they will get an output like this:

mdk@wikk:~$ cowsay -f bill "Have you tried the new Windows version?"
 _________________________________________
< Have you tried the new Windows version? >
 -----------------------------------------
\
 \
  \    \__.,.
   \ -."     "./
     /,/---"""\\
     ; __   __ ;
    (=[0 ]"[ 0]=)
    \| ""._,"" |/
     |  .___,  |
      \_,   ._/
        "---"
mdk@wiki:~$ sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

There are many options for cowsay, although, as the name suggests, cowsay is slightly obsessed with cows. There's a normal cow, a cow hiding behind a tree (cower.cow), a cow dressed as «Cowth Vader» (vader.cow), a cow LARP'ing as a moose (moose.cow), you get the picture. During the late 80s/early 90s, Eric W. Tilenius would make a few Usenet posts that feature cows in strange or pun-related situations, often making them anthropomorphic in some way.

Jason Scott's Textfiles.com hosts at least three of these posts: cow.txt, cows.txt, and finally cowz.txt, like this example from a November 1989 post:

            o
            | [---]
            |   |
            |   |                              |------========|
       /----|---|\                             | **** |=======|
      /___/___\___\                         o  | **** |=======|
      |            |                     ___|  |==============|
      |           |                ___  {(__)} |==============|
      \-----------/             [](   )={(oo)} |==============|
       \  \   /  /             /---===--{ \/ } |
    -----------------         / | NASA  |====  |
    |               |        *  ||------||-----
    -----------------           ||      |      |
      /    /  \   \                            |
     /     ----    \
                          This cow jumped over the Moon

Note that these cows are not the same as those that live inside the cowsay program, but seeing that they both feature the theme of cows doing strange and funny acts, it would not be all that shocking if Eric W. Tilenius inspired – even indirectly – Tony Monroe in 1999 to make what would become cowsay.

# Credits and Notes

This page was last edited on 2026-09-09 03:47:10.

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