Once upon a time, ASCII art was practiced in e-mail messages sent around the world. Unfortunately, fancy fonts and HTML-ized e-mails have struck a powerful blow to this ancient and noble art form. The most missed are probably the cows, for Tony Monroe, anyhow. His cowsay program (a nice, easy-to-play-with Perl script) provides a simple way to generate an ASCII cow that speaks your message. Head on over to www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml to pick up your copy and extract it into your directory. (A number of distributions have cowsay in their repositories, so look there first). The installation consists of running an install.sh file. Running the program also is quite simple. Let’s pretend that I want a cow saying “More wine, please”:

$ cowsay More wine please.
-------------------
< More wine please. >
-------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

But wait! There’s more . . . oh yes!

If you prefer, the cow can think these sayings. Just use the cowthink command instead of cowsay.

With the -e and -T options, you can define the cow’s eyes and tongue. You also can use the -f option to specify any of the other animals (or cow-like creatures) in the /usr/local/share/cows directory (or /usr/share/cows if you installed from a package). You’ll even find Tux there.

$ cowsay -f vader Use the source, Mook.
 _______________________
< Use the source, Mook. >
 -----------------------
        \    ,-^-.
         \   !oYo!
          \ /./=\.\______
               ##        )\/\
                ||-----w||
                ||      ||

               Cowth Vader

Be warned, however, that some of the art can be a bit off-color.

Talking milk carton, anyone?