cowsay

This fork is called "cowsay-org" where needed to distinguish it from the original Cowsay project. Otherwise, the program and project itself are still called "Cowsay". The bulk of Cowsay's functionality is from Tony Monroe's original project. The cowsay-org fork primarily provides maintenance, hosting, and deployment support, plus support for random cow selection and pluggable third-party cow collections. Cowsay is actually a pretty old program. It was originally written by Tony Monroe and was first released in 1999, but was in use by Monroe for quite a while before that. The first major version of Cowsay had one cow and one message template: $foo is $verb $bar . Not very flexible, but people managed to do pretty interesting things with it. The second major version scrapped many of the limitations of the first, by allowing arbitrary messages, multiple cowfiles, and even support for cows talking in figlet. The third version was a rewrite of the second into Perl 5, whereupon the code got a lot smaller and more manageable. :-) Cowsay requires Perl 5.005 03 or later. Because all our development and testing is done with the Perl from recent OS distributions, it may well require a version newer than 5.005 03, but I'm not sure exactly which. You can find collections of cowfiles for use with Cowsay in various third-party projects. Here's a list of some that look interesting: See the documentation in each for instructions on how to install them. You can also use Cowsay's etc/cowsay/cowpath.d mechanism to make Cowsay aware of them at a system-wide level, so users don't have to configure their $COWPATH variables themselves. There's also cowsay-org's own cows-offensive collection, which holds cows that were historically in cowsay, but have been removed to keep the main cowsay distribution suitable for work and family use.