Cowsay is one of those packages you just end up installing randomly on just about any client over time.
And if your using ansible you may be in for a little surprise:
____________
< PLAY [all] >
------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
If you don’t like this you can disable it by setting ANSIBLE_NOCOWS=1 either for a specific run or in your shells profile.
But I tend to agree with the documentation on this one.
If you have cowsay installed but want to avoid the ‘cows’ (why????), use this.
ANSIBLE_NOCOWS=1 ansible-playbook play.yml
If you like a little surprise every time you run a playbook you could also set it to random, which will choose one of the available cowsay characters for each playbook run.
ANSIBLE_COW_SELECTION=random ansible-playbook play.yml
Or you could limit it to a subset of available characters with ANSIBLE_COW_ACCEPTLIST.
Engineers having fun
I think this is a great example of engineers just having fun with a feature that doesn’t have to exist, but brings so much joy when you discover it.
If you are curious: Here is the code that selects the right cowsay, the PRs around it are a joy to read, especially this one. And of course there are test cases for it.