🐄 Add Colorful Cows to Your Terminal

Have you ever wanted to see a random, funny and colorful message every time you launch your terminal? Well I did, and and here’s how you can do it too.

Dependencies

• fortune to generate a message
• cowsay to print a character
• lolcat to color the output

How To

Just add this one-liner to your .bashrc and you’re all set!

# Fancy pants one-liner
fortune | cowsay -f $(node -e "var c='$(cowsay -l)'.split('  ');console.log(c[Math.floor(Math.random()*c.length)])") | lolcat --seed 0 --spread 1.0

Here’s a slightly more comprehensible version of the same code.

# Randomly select a cow name
cow=$(node -e "var c='$(cowsay -l)'.split('  ');console.log(c[Math.floor(Math.random()*c.length)])")

# Or, if you have shuf (or gshuf) installed
#  cow=$(shuf -n 1 -e $(cowsay -l))

fortune | cowsay -f "$cow" | lolcat --spread 1.0

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