getting cowsay to send one word at a time in putty

Question

Hi just wondering how to get cowsay to read off one word at a time from a text file. I'm at ground zero right now, using putty and really need help.

Answer 1

This seems to be a rare case where word splitting is actually desirable:

for word in $(<file.txt); do cowsay "$word"; sleep 1; done

(the sleep command is optional). Or there's always xargs:

xargs -a file.txt -n1 cowsay

Answer 2

Here's something I came up with really quickly. I put one line in a test file then fed it to cowsay.

terrance@terrance-ubuntu:~$ cat cstest.txt 
This is a test file to test cowsay

I set it to read each line, then do a for loop of each line to read each word. Example below:

:~$ cat cstest.txt | while read line; do for word in $line; do cowsay $word; done; done
 ______
< This >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ____
< is >
 ----
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ___
< a >
 ---
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ______
< test >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ______
< file >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ____
< to >
 ----
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ______
< test >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ________
< cowsay >
 --------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Each individual line of that command would look like:

:~$ cat cstest.txt | while read line
>do 
>for word in $line
>do 
>cowsay $word
>done
>done

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Python one-liner:

python -c 'import sys,subprocess;[subprocess.call(["cowsay",w]) for l in sys.stdin for w in l.split()]' < words.txt

Sample run:

$ cat words.txt
this is a test
$ python -c 'import sys,subprocess;[subprocess.call(["cowsay",w]) for l in sys.stdin for w in l.split()]' < words.txt                 
 ______
< this >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ____
< is >
 ----
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ___
< a >
 ---
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
 ______
< test >
 ------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||
$