Episode: 1779
Title: HPR1779: Cowsay and Figlet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1779/hpr1779.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:11:18

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This is HPR episode 1,779 entitled, Kausei and Figglet.
It is hosted by John Colp and in about 16 minutes long.
The summary is Kausei and Figglet.
Too far has context commands.
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Hey everybody, John Colp and Lafayette Louisiana here.
And today I'm going to talk about a couple of fun Linux commands that I like to use for
various reasons that I'll get into in just a moment.
But the commands are Kausei and Figglet.
Kausei and Figglet are both commands that you can use to do fun things with text.
Kausei will have either a cow or some other animal or image or something.
Say the words that you tell it to.
And Figglet creates a kind of ASCII text banner for you.
So I don't really know whether Kausei comes by default installed on Linux systems or
not.
I don't remember, but it's very easy to install with just apt-get install Kausei or whatever
you use on your Linux distribution.
You can also probably get it on the various versions of BSD or on a Mac system or something
like that.
But once you have Kausei installed, it's very easy to run in a terminal.
You simply type the word Kausei, space, and then in quotes, whatever you want the cow
to say.
And on the show notes, I will give you a few examples.
The first one is Kausei, space, open quote, hacker public radio, close quote.
And then I show the result of it there.
There's a little cow that says hacker public radio.
Now there are various modes of Kausei and you can look at the man page for a rundown of
all of them.
The modes are Borg mode, dead with a D flag.
A G flag will give you greedy mode and that turns the eyeballs into dollar signs.
Let's see, P flag causes a state of paranoia to come over the cow.
That's what the manual page says.
And I don't remember what the change to the eyeballs is.
Most of these things change either the eyeballs or the tongue or both.
The S flag makes the cow appear thoroughly stoned.
T yields a tired cow and W is somewhat the opposite of T and initiates wired mode.
All of these things are right from the man page.
Y brings on the cow's youthful appearance.
So in the show notes I give an example where I use the tired mode.
And to do that you do Kausei space dash T to give it the tired flag.
And then I say, Ken is tired of begging for shows and so that results in a cow with hyphens
for eyeballs saying Ken is tired of begging for shows.
So those are different ways to make the cow look different and say different things.
Now you can also make stuff besides the cow appear.
There's a whole bunch of, I think on my system there are 46 different cow say images.
And you use the different cow say files by using the F flag.
So if the example that I give in the show notes I use a dragon, cow say space dash F space
dragon space.
And then I give the dragon something to say.
In this case I say you can threaten someone with a dragon.
The dragon here is saying record and upload a show or else.
So then you can see the dragon saying this.
There's also a way to make the animals think these things so that you get like little thought
bubbles instead of a speech bubble.
But I couldn't figure out how to do that.
Interestingly there's an Android app for cows say that is actually easier to do these things.
You get little drop down menus to choose which image you want to use.
And then you can choose which mode from another drop down menu.
And then you can share it either by it will make an image out of it or you can send it
as text in an email or something like that.
Okay, so then the next example that I give in the show notes shows how you can pipe something
through cow say.
So you don't have to start with the cow say command here I do an echo.
And you guys might want to look at this command in the show notes.
I like this one.
On Linux, praise a hookah with a random cow.
I thought I would praise a hookah because he's such a frequent contributor to this show
that he's worthy of praise.
So I do echo single quote a hookah rocks exclamation point single quote.
And then a vertical bar to pipe it through cow say space dash F space.
And then I have a command that will choose a cow randomly by first finding all of the
cow say files.
So to do that, I do locate asterisk dot cow vertical bar.
So that that finds them all.
And then to select one randomly, I use the chef command that's SHUF.
I guess that's short for shuffle.
And then I on the chef command, I give it the N one flag, which tells it to bring back
only one result.
So it shuffles them all and then just brings back the top one.
And I enclose that whole thing in a dollar sign open parenthesis, locate space asterisk.
. cow vertical bar, chef space dot N one, close parenthesis.
So cow say will use the file that is the result of that whole command.
Anyway, it's probably easier to go to the show notes and look at that thing.
But if you paste that into your terminal and run it, after you have cow say installed,
and incidentally you might have to install chef as well.
I don't remember whether that comes as a default package or not.
But in the time that I did it, it came back with the Calth Vader image saying a hook
a rocks.
Now, I used single quotes that time because I was using an exclamation point.
When I said a hook a rocks, I followed it with an exclamation point.
And if you don't use the single quotes, then the shell will treat that exclamation point
as some kind of operator.
So you have to use the single quotes instead of double quotes there.
All right.
So that's how you use cow say now, you might wonder what good is this?
Why would I need to make cows or other images say things?
And the reason is it's fun.
And the way I use them is every once in a while I will send somebody a message that way.
But you kind of have to be careful sending asky images in email because they don't always
look right.
Most email clients are not configured to display plain text properly.
They'll try to interpret it as HTML and then the images get all garbled.
But the way I use these things the most is just in little comments to myself inside my
source files.
So in my counterpoint books or in my course syllabi or any other documents that I write in HTML
or LATAC or anything like that for subheadings or just sections where I want to divide one
part from another, I will generate one of these cow say images that say,
I don't know, chapter three or something like that and then enclose it in comment code
so that it shows up as a comment and nobody else can see it.
It's just kind of a nice thing that makes me smile when I see it there in my code.
I also use cow say to post little fun messages like this for my counterpoint students.
I will display them as HTML labels on Moodle.
And so I don't know, it's just kind of a fun thing.
Another thing I do that I think is kind of fun and I've come to rely on it is on my Raspberry
Pi.
I have a script that every day at I think 5 a.m. it runs this script and it does an e-links
command, an e-links dump command that downloads in plain text the contents of weather.com for
my zip code and it scrapes out just the information I want which is the current temperature.
And it finds the current temperature on that page and gets rid of everything else and
then formats that for me using a random cow say image and then e-mails it to me.
So every morning when I wake up there's an e-mail waiting for me from my Raspberry Pi with
a random cow say image telling me what the current temperature is.
And so it's kind of fun and something that I'm used to.
For sending the e-mail I use a package called send email which I think is just a perl script
where you set up some kind of little configuration file with your details or in the script itself
you can tell it what username and password and e-mail address to use and all that stuff.
So that's how I use cow say now figlet does not use images like that it just prints out
text but it does it in sort of banner style.
So I would encourage you to look on the show notes where I give some examples.
The first one I give is figletspace-w that's the wrap option it tells you how many characters
to go before it starts wrapping to a new line.
I do figletspace-w space 45 telling it to wrap after 45 characters.
Space open quotes hacker public radio close quote and then I show you the result on there
and it does hacker public radio in very large letters one word per line because of the
wrap option that I put there.
If I had given no wrapping option it would put it all just right out in a single line.
And figlet has several different fonts that you can use including slanty ones small ones.
You can tell it to keep the letters from touching each other or you can have them snuggle
up next to each other and that's the default option.
They also allow you to print out text with stuff around each letter and I use one of those
for another example in the show notes use an alternate font with the dash f option.
So in this one I use the digital font which puts little pluses and minuses and vertical
bars around every letter.
So here the command is figletspace-f-digital that tells it to use the digital font and
then whatever you want it to say.
In this case I used community news and then I show you the result on the show notes there
community news with a bunch of pluses and minuses and vertical bars surrounding every
letter.
So and I use figlet in much the same way that I use cow say I'll have a section headings
inside my source code done up in figlet to make it easier to see as I'm scrolling through
and also to make it kind of fun.
So that's it.
I'm going to put some links in the show notes also.
One of the links is to my random cow say is it Friday yet web page and this is where
I think every half hour or so my web server runs my script for is it Friday which checks
what day it is and depending on what day it is it'll say either yes it's Friday or no
it's not Friday you've got so many days left until Friday and the whole thing is told
to you by a random cow say image and the script generates a bit of static HTML and sticks
it in place on my server.
So you can look at that I'm also going to link to the cow say for Android app and then
the cow say and figlet man pages.
So cow say and figlets good fun on the terminal on a unix system go make yourself some
masky text by yo.
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