I have recently installed cowsay and am using it to amuse me by piping the output from fortune to it. And although this is great, I understand that you can get more than just cows with cowsay, and I have looked in /usr/share/cowsay/cows and found the following files:

apt.cow ghostbusters.cow sheep.cow
beavis.zen.cow gnu.cow skeleton.cow
bong.cow head-in.cow snowman.cow
bud-frogs.cow hellokitty.cow sodomized-sheep.cow
bunny.cow kiss.cow stegosaurus.cow
calvin.cow kitty.cow stimpy.cow
cheese.cow koala.cow suse.cow
cock.cow kosh.cow three-eyes.cow
cower.cow luke-koala.cow turkey.cow
daemon.cow mech-and-cow.cow turtle.cow
default.cow meow.cow tux.cow
dragon-and-cow.cow milk.cow unipony.cow
dragon.cow moofasa.cow unipony-smaller.cow
duck.cow moose.cow vader.cow
elephant.cow mutilated.cow vader-koala.cow
elephant-in-snake.cow pony.cow
eyes.cow pony-smaller.cow
flaming-sheep.cow ren.cow

Which all seem to be different cool things like this was the contents of ghostbusters.cow:

So my question is, how do I activate all these other fun creatures? And can I get it to pick one at random for each strange message?

2 Answers

To achieve what you want run :

fortune | cowsay -f ghostbusters

---

And for random ... :

fortune | cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ | shuf -n 1`

2

After you go to /usr/share/cowsay/cow, type:

lolcat skeleton.cow

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