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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Wow I've had my terminals open with fortune | cowsay for years but somehow had no idea that there were different cows.

Should anyone also happen to be interested in taking a quick glance at everything installed by default:

    cowsay -l | tail -n +2 | sed 's/ /\n/g' | xargs -i% bash -c 'echo %; fortune -s | cowsay -f %; printf "\n\n\n"'

edit: I like the novelty, I'm going to try out having a random "cow" saying my fortune greeting:

    fortune -s | cowsay -f $(cowsay -l | tail -n +2 | sed 's/ /\n/g' | shuf | head -n 1)

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Oh man, I just tried and my first shot was:

     ________________________________________
    < Your ignorance cramps my conversation. >
     ----------------------------------------
     \     ____________
      \    |__________|
          /           /\
         /           /  \
        /___________/___/|
        |          |     |
        |  ==\ /== |     |
        |   O   O  | \ \ |
        |     <    |  \ \|
       /|          |   \ \
      / |  \_____/ |   / /
     / /|          |  / /|
    /||\|          | /||\/
        -------------|
            | |    | |
           <__/    \__>

It's super easy to create your own cows. Just look at any of the files in /usr/share/cowsay. You basically just have to get an ascii picture and add a couple of tags. Mine's a hypnotoad.

Once I left my laptop unlocked at university and a fellow student and friend of mine added something to my .bashrc using a custom cowsay file being piped some text he got from a bash error handling mechanism I don't recall.

He already had the cow art file on his computer for some reason so I think the deed took him only a minute or so. The overall effect was that if you entered a command not recognised by the shell (like typoing dc instead of cd for example) an ascii-art version of a certain microsoft paperclip would respond "I'm sorry I don't know how to dc, would you like help with that?"

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