Cowsay doesn't say anything

Question

Okay, I know this is kind of a stupid question to bring to the table here... but why not.

I'm using OS X 10.9.2, Mavericks, and have installed cowsay in my terminal with $ sudo gem install cowsay and it said everything installed properly.

However, when I run $ cowsay, the little dudes don't ever say anything!

Here's some pics of the problem.

So can someone tell me...

How to configure cowsay so I can select which critters I wantto see? "

How to give them something to say?

The command to make each new terminal start with cowsay if the section of the OS X Terminal where you can specify a start-up command doesn't work? Is there a github repo where I can download new phrases and critters?

Any info you guys can provide me so I can enjoy these little critters more whenever Terminal starts up will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot :)

Solution 1

You have to pipe the text you want to have "said by the cow"

echo "hello world" | cowsay

Another cool thing to do is mixing cowsay and fortune

fortune | cowsay

Solution 2

You can also type
cowsay "The text you want to say"

Comments

[uday]

do I need to install another gem for fortune to work?

[chaput]

yes you need to install it : osx : sudo port install fortune ubuntu : sudo apt-get install fortune

[Giacomo1968]

This is really overcomplcataed. All one has to do is type in cowsay hello wolrd for cowsay to then say hello world.