ponysay - A cowsay wrapper for ponies.

Today your terminal, tomorrow the world!

Installation on GNU/Linux (or other Unix implementations)

First of all, you need cowsay from your local repositories. Obtain it from here if you wish to compile it yourself. This is often sufficient, but if is not you may be missing one of the standard packages: bash, coreutils or sed.

Download or clone the project. In the terminal, cd into the ponysay directory and ./configure && make && make install. You make need to be super user to run make install, on most systems this can be achieved by running sudo make install.

If either make or make install fails you be missing one of the standard packages: gcc, gzip, make or coreutils, or git.

In order to use ponysay, run:

ponysay "I am just the cutest pony!"

Or if you have a specific pony in your mind:

ponysay -f pinkie "Partay!~"

Run info ponysay, man 6 ponysay or ponysay -h for more information. A Spanish manual is available: man -L es 6 ponysay.

Arch Linux

The package is in the official repositories as community/ponysay.

Gentoo Linux

There is a package for Gentoo, to make installation and keeping it up to date easy. You can find it in this overlay. The package is named games-misc/ponysay.

Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu

The DEB file can be found here and the PPA can be found here.

Pony fortune on terminal startup

This requires that you have the fortune utility installed. You can install it from your repositories (may be named fortune-mod) or just fetch the source code from here.

You can try this script or ponypipe to ponify fortunes.

Edit your ~/.bashrc and add this to the end of the file

fortune | ponysay

Now every time you open a terminal a pony should give your fortune

Pony quotes

Running ponysay -q will give you a random pony saying one it its quote from MLP:FiM. Add one or more argument after -q to sepecify a set of ponies from which one will be selected randomly.

When running ponysay -l or ponysay -L the ponies which have quotes will be printed bold or bright (depending on terminal).

Ponies in TTY (Linux VT)

If you have a custom colour palette edit your ~/.bashrc and add

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    function ponysay
    {
        exec ponysay "$@"
        #RESET PALETTE HERE
    }
fi

Installation on Microsoft™ Windows®

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dependencies

Required runtime dependencies

bash: bash is used in a minor part of the program to make everything work, this will be removed later

coreutils: stty in coreutils used to determine size of the terminal, other parts of coreutils will not be needed for long

cowsay: this is a wrapper for cowsay

python>=3: Written in python 3

Package building dependencies

gcc: used for compiling truncater.c

gzip: used for compressing manpages

make: required to run the make script

coreutils: make script uses install, unlink, rm, ln, mkdir and cp

FAQ

Q: The output looks like a mess in (TTY/PuTTY/other)!

A: Unfortunately, there's nothing much we can do about it. See issue 1.

Q: You are missing (my-favourite-pony)!

A: Ask and we'll add!

Q: Which programs do you use to generate the pony files?

A: The pony files are actually mostly a bunch of selected browser ponies that are generated into cow files via img2xterm or util-say.