Fun with Cowsay » @cyberfellabtc, since 2012.

The terminal can get a little tiresome by the end of a full working week, so why not use cowsay to add a little fun to your stdout?

Just be sure to check its actually installed before you start calling it from your shell scripts. I found it was installed by default on Debian based distros but not on a Centos7 VM i spun up using vagrant, so you’re mileage may vary as they say.

Installation

sudo apt-get install cowsay

Basic usage

cowsay “hello”

View all the possible “cows”

ls -1 /usr/share/cowsay/cows | cut -d . -f1 | while read eachline; do cowsay -f $eachline “$eachline”; done

There’s loads of them and more to choose from online too. In the meantime, here’s a couple dragons to whet your appetite…

You can specify the cow you want, in the command with say -f dragon

If you want tux to tell you the current price of bitcoin in USD….

install pre-reqs: sudo apt-get install cowsay jq curl

curl -s 'https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin&vs_currencies=usd' | jq -r '.bitcoin.usd' | xargs -I {} cowsay -f tux "Current Bitcoin price is {} USD"

Create a zsh command alias to have tux announce the bitcoin price each time you clear the terminal.

Create the file: ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/aliases.zsh

alias cls="clear && curl -s 'https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin&vs_currencies=usd' | jq -r '.bitcoin.usd' | xargs -I {} cowsay -f tux ""{} USD" 2>&1""