R Observatory: Metrics for cowsay version 1.2.2

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

cowsay

1.2.2

Messages, Warnings, Strings with Ascii Animals

1packages depend

34.2Kdownloads / year

31.7%test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Scott ChamberlainFirst published 2015-10-1310 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Allows printing of character strings as messages/warnings/etc. with ASCII animals, including cats, cows, frogs, chickens, ghosts, and more.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("cowsay", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("sckott/cowsay")

Development version from sckott/cowsay. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-cowsay

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-cowsay

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-cowsay

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 2.4 min · r-oldrel-macos-x86_64

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 0.06

31.7%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

2

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-08-05
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-08-01
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 574 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 33% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 33%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

34.2K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #2,795 · ~94/day · ~2.9K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

2.2K30 days

5.6K90 days

34.2K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on177 r2u23 autocran56 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ sckott/cowsay

352Stars

54Forks

3Open issues

0Open PRs

9Releases

459Commits

28Contributors

ascii-artrstatsrr-stats

459 commits · Last activity 2025-10-29 · +0.3% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-08-15 · 3322026-08-05 · 352

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

7 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 6 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/sckott/cowsay on 2026-08-16.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

Makefile

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdrevdep/

Docs source (1)

README.Rmd

Show all practices

Research and citation (1)

codemeta.json

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

7 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (0)

none

Imports (2)

crayon rlang

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (5)

fortunes rmsfact knitr rmarkdown testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

1direct

0indirect

dRiftDM

Code & Tests

People & History

People (17)

Maintainer (1)

Scott Chamberlain

Author, Maintainer

Authors (2)

Scott Chamberlain

Author, Maintainer

Amanda Dobbyn

Author · added in 0.7.0

Contributors (15)

Philipp Boersch-Supan

Contributor · added in 0.6.0

Andreas Brandmaier

Contributor · added in 0.6.0

Karl Broman

Contributor

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan

Contributor · added in 0.5.0

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Show 7 more contributors

Marion Louveaux

Contributor · added in 0.8.0

Tyler Rinker

Contributor

Noam Ross

Contributor

David Schoch

Contributor · added in 1.0.0

Carson Sievert

Contributor

Andy Teucher

Contributor

Guangchuang Yu

Contributor · added in 0.5.0

Package Timeline

10 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.2.2Latest
2025-10-29 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
1.2.0
2025-03-29 · diff ↗
1.0.0
2024-12-05 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.9.0
2023-11-02 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.8.2
2023-03-08 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.8.0
2020-02-06 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.7.0
2018-09-18 · diff ↗
0.6.0
2018-05-15 · diff ↗

Show 6 earlier events

R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.5.0
2016-12-16 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.4.0
2015-10-13
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2015-10-13
Total releases: 10 / 11 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Download size: 650 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("cowsay")

Format

Chamberlain, S., Boersch-Supan, P., Brandmaier, A., Broman, K., D'Agostino McGowan, L., Dobbyn, A., FitzJohn, R., Gotanda, K., Krah, F., Leeper, T., Louveaux, M., Rinker, T., Ross, N., Schoch, D., Sievert, C., Teucher, A., & Yu, G. (2025). cowsay: Messages, Warnings, Strings with Ascii Animals (Version 1.2.2) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.cowsay

This is what citation() produces when a package has no citation file of its own. If it prints something else, use that.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for cowsay version 1.2.2 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-08-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-08-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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