Random cow(ish) animals preaching quotes on Ubuntu 9.10

February 3, 2010 2 Comments

Looking for something interesting when I login to one of my servers, I decided to whip up the following script I appended to my ~/.bashrc file.

# fortune and cowsay are needed for the snippet to work, I had to install these first
sudo apt-get install fortune cowsay

COWDIR=/usr/share/cowsay/cows/; COWNUM=$(($RANDOM%$(ls $COWDIR | wc -l))); COWFILE=$(ls $COWDIR | sed -n ''$COWNUM'p'); fortune | cowsay -f $COWFILE

UPDATE:

Suggested by MrBougo, a shorter but perhaps more process intensive method:

fortune | cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ | shuf | head -n1)

random cowsay fortune

Breaking down the script, the first 3 parts create variables and the last command executes the cowsay and quote.

# defines the directory of the cow files
COWDIR=/usr/share/cowsay/cows/;
 
# Get a random number limited to the number of files in the directory, making clever use of % (mod) and adding 1 to make sure it doesn't return 0
COWNUM=$(($RANDOM%$(ls $COWDIR | wc -l))+1);
 
# list the contents of the cow dir again, pipe to sed and use the number as a random line to get the name of a file
COWFILE=$(ls $COWDIR | sed -n ''$COWNUM'p');
 
# use fortune to get a quote, pipe to cowsay and use the file as defined above
fortune | cowsay -f $COWFILE;

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2 comments so far

Mr. Bougo February 4, 2010 1:41 pm

Short one-liner: fortune | cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ | shuf | head -n1)

It’s probably more expensive than picking one random line number, but we’re dealing with a relatively small list of files, so it’s not that much of a downside.
zzxop February 16, 2010 3:01 am

hi,i use the last method. but i get an error!
”
bash: command substitution: line 14: syntax error near unexpected token `+1′
bash: command substitution: line 14: `($RANDOM%$(ls $COWDIR | wc -l))+1′
”

I use Xfce Terminal on archlinux