lolcat — rainbow coloring for text

Synopsis

lolcat [options] [files] ...

Description

This manual page documents briefly the lolcat command.

lolcat is a program that concatenates files, or standard input, to standard output (like the generic cat), and adds rainbow coloring to it.

Options

-p f, --spread=f
Inclination of the rainbow stripes (character widths per line hight; high values (>1000) give almost horizonal stripes, low values (0.1) almost vertical ones; default: 3.0).
-F f, --freq=f
Frequency of the rainbow (low values around 0.0001 give almost monochromous screens; default: 0.1).
-S i, --seed=i
Initial value for the random number generator; 0 means automatic (default: 0).
-a, --animate
Fade every line through an animation before printing the next one.
-d i, --duration=i
Duration of the animation (number of steps before showing next line; default: 12)
-s i, --speed=i
Speed of the animation (frame rate, ie. number of steps per second; default: 20)
-f, --force
Force color even when stdout is not a tty
-v, --version
Show version of lolcat.
-h, --help
Show summary of options.

Examples

Typical combinations of lolcat include other programs that generate text:

Large colorful words can be written like this:

echo "KTHXBAI" | toilet | lolcat

Cows are popular, come in all colors, and tell random epigrams:

fortune | cowsay | lolcat -a

Author

lolcat was written by Moe <moe@busyloop.net>.

This manual page was written by chrysn <chrysn@fsfe.org>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others).