Cowseii

With all due respect to 'cowsay'

I was looking into Ansible and discovered that it will use the cowsay program by default if that program is installed. However, cowsay is bound into a fixed graphic and doesn't always look quite right when many lines of an Ansible playbook are scrolling past.

What if it were tweaked a little to allow free-form text, while maintaining all the same functionality that people knew and loved?

             _____
 __          \   /
|  |_________| * |-------------------------------------------\
|  |         | * | TASK [Output text in a more Ansible-friendly way]
|  |_________| * |                                             \
|__|         | * |----------------------------------------------\
             /___\

I am not a Perl programmer, and this tweak is not intended as a new version of "cowsay". However, it does maintain compatibility completely as far as I can tell. Other than the binary name changing, you shouldn't notice any difference until using a .cow file which contains the (new!) TEXT tag.

Usage

Install as shown in "INSTALL" file. Afterwards you can test with the command cowseii -f sword.cow Man, that's pretty sharp! in your terminal.

To use cowseii with https://www.ansible.com/ playbooks, alter your ANSIBLE_COW_PATH variable to point to the cowseii binary. For a more Ansible-friendly display, also set ANSIBLE_COW_SELECTION to sword.cow.

Respecting cowsay installs

Cowseii will try not to overwrite any existing installs of cowsay. This includes the following:

• Won't use the cowsay name via symlink or otherwise
• Won't symlink itself to cowthink if that link exists
• Won't install a man page for cowthink if that link exists
• Won't overwrite any existing .cow files in the default location
• Will install .cow files which don't already exist

Terms

The following has been retained from cowsay:

For the terms and conditions of use, consult the LICENSE file in this directory.