Ever wanted to type in text terminal somehow funnier? This article describes two programs that can be used to generate a little less standard output in Linux console: cowsay and figlet.

Author: Karol Kozioł “axio”

What is the ASCII-Art?

ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard. For more information visit [5].

Installing the necessary software

If you are lucky, cowsay and FIGlet are already in the repositories of your distribution. This is so in Ubuntu, Debian and derivatives, as well as in many other systems. In order to install the required software in Ubuntu, just type the following in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install cowsay figlet

And after a few seconds you can use the programs. Of course you can use the Synaptic Package Manager to do the job, as well as multiple other alternatives for installing software in GNU/Linux.

Introducing Cowsay and Cowthink

Cowsay/Cowthink is a program generating ascii-cow (or other animals, as described later in the article) to present a text in similar way to the method used by comic artists. This way you can find out what ascii-animals think or say in relevant topics.

The difference between cowsay and cowthink is in the type of bubbles they generate. As you might have guessed these are speech bubbles for cowsay and thought bubbles for cowthink

OK, so let’s start the show now:

This is the console output of the following command:

cowsay "Dragonia Magazine"

Except for this simple command, you can use many different options (switches) which will cause your text look a bit more attractive.

Let’s try this command:

cowsay -f name "sample_text"

It will generate sample_text with an animal defined with name.

The list of available ascii-animals can be found in /usr/share/cowsay-3.03/cows/ directory (as you see it is in version 3.03, the path can be different for other versions).

In my case:

ls /usr/share/cowsay-3.03/cows

returns the following list of files:

beavis.zen.cow hellokitty.cow small.cow
bong.cow kiss.cow sodomized.cow
bud-frogs.cow kitty.cow stegosaurus.cow
bunny.cow koala.cow stimpy.cow
cheese.cow kosh.cow supermilker.cow
cower.cow luke-koala.cow surgery.cow
daemon.cow mech-and-cow telebears.cow
default.cow meow.cow three-eyes.cow
dragon-and-cow.cow milk.cow turkey.cow
dragon.cow moofasa.cow turtle.cow
elephant.cow moose.cow tux.cow
elephant-in-snake.cow mutilated.cow udder.cow
eyes.cow ren.cow vader.cow
flaming-sheep.cow satanic.cow vaderkoala.cow
ghostbusters.cow sheep.cow www.cow
head-in.cow skeleton.cow

Instead of name in the command, as demonstrated earlier, enter one of those file names, without extension (.cow). One of my favorites is:

cowsay -f elephant-in-snake "Polish your GNU/Linux!"

Those who do remember “Little Prince”, will easily associate what I meant, the rest should visit the nearest library.

The another interesting way for introducing some diversity in our little
cow is to manipulate its eye shape. To do it use following options:

-b -d -t -y -g -p -s -w

Instead of describing those options, I suggest to run the program with one of them, and see in your own eyes what will happen (how our cow will change).

Another option enabling to define specifically the shape of eyes is:

-e shape_desc

For example, the command:

cowsay -e "QQ" "Dragonia Magazine"

returns:

Eyes do not have to be symmetrical. You have to remember that there are only two letters to use and the attempt of “complicating” the shape of eyes will fail.

Unfortunately, as I observed, those options change only the shape of eyes of the standard ascii-cow, not all animals.

Finally, the last option left to describe which is

-W cols_number

where cols_number defines how long (in columns) should be the line of text.

If cols_number is defined as “10″ then 9 letters will be printed in one line and the 10th one will be moved to the next line.

Output of the following command:

cowsay -W 4 "Cowsay rocks"

will look like this:

At the end I will only add that cowsay is written in PERL, so before its installation check if you have PERL installed in your system. You can download this program from [1].

You can find it in portage tree of Gentoo or you can install it using RPMs for many distributions (I recommend to seek amongst RPMs on the site [2]).

Final notice! What to do when you want to save your beautiful image to a file? Nothing easier. Just redirect the command to a file like this:

cowsay "Dragonia Magazine" >> file.txt

This command saves the output of Cowsay to the file “file.txt”.

Figlet

I already described all the options that I use in cowsay, so let’s leave the talking cows for a while and move onto the next program - Figlet.

Figlet (or more correctly FIGlet) is a tool used to generate ornamental inscriptions. Unlike cowsay, here inscriptions pretend to be ascii-art, not their rim alone.

To make an inscription with Figlet, just enter the following command:

figlet Dragonia Magazine

or

figlet "Dragonia Magazine"

which will generate following output:

Usually figlet treats all arguments as a text to transform. If you want to use options, you have to quote the text. One of the most common options is kerning , what means adding a blank space between letters. To use kerning in your transformed inscription, provide -k option, i.e. the text above with kerning will look like this:

figlet -k "Dragonia Magazine"

You see the difference, don’t you? Another option controls text alignment. There are 3 standard positions:

• The left alignment (option -l),
• The right alignment (option -r)
• The center (option -c).

Figlet enables generating inscriptions that pretend different ornamental fonts. Apart from the default font, you can choose a font to transform the text.
The list of available fonts is in /usr/share/figlet/ directory (these are files with .flf extension).

To use specific font, use option -f font_name, where font_name is a file name of the font file without the extension. For instance, you can transform “Dragonia Magazine” text using a script font.

The command:

figlet -f script "Dragonia Magazine"

and its output:

There is also -d dir_name option which makes the program to use fonts from dir_name.

There are lot of different options in figlet which I won’t describe here (you can check out the manual of figlet to see more).

The home page is [3], but this is not the only one. There are many sites in the Internet about it, because figlet is very popular. You can generate figlet inscriptions in a web browser visiting the site [4].

Useful links

• [1] http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml
• [2] http://rpm.pbone.net/
• [3] http://www.figlet.org/
• [4] http://www.schnoggo.com/figlet.html
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

This article has been first published in Dragonia Magazine, a Polish online magazine about Free and Open-Source Software. You can download the latest Dragonia issue (first one in English from our mirror).