LOLCAT(6)

✨ LOLCAT ✨ (section 6 of the Games Manual, bestie 💖)

okay so you found the lolcat page?? congrats you're officially in the cool kids club 🎀 it lives in the Games Manual, which is exactly the energy we're bringing here.

🌈 NAME 🌈

lolcat — it's the rainbow coloring effect for your text console display 💅 literally making your terminal gay and gorgeous since forever.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

lolcat [options] [files] ...

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so this manual page documents, like, briefly, the lolcat command. quick lil intro, iykyk.

lolcat is a program that concatenates files, or standard input, to standard output — exactly like the generic cat does — and it adds rainbow coloring to it. no cap. it's cat but make it fashion ✨🌈

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -p X, --spread=X — the inclination of the rainbow stripes. this is measured in character widths per line height. high values (>1000) give you almost horizontal stripes, low values (0.1) give you almost vertical ones. default: 3.0 🦋
• -F X, --freq=X — the frequency of the rainbow effect. low values around 0.0001 give you almost monochromous screens (sad 😭). default: 0.1 ✨
• -S X, --seed=X — the initial value for the random number generator. 0 means automatic. default: 0 🎲
• -a, --animate — fades every line through an animation before printing the next one. it's giving main character energy, fr fr 💫
• -d X, --duration=X — the duration of the animation, as in the number of steps before showing the next line. default: 12 ⏳
• -s X, --speed=X — the speed of the animation, aka the frame rate, ie. number of steps per second. default: 20 🏃♀️💨
• -i, --invert — inverts the background and foreground colors. flip it, reverse it 💅
• -t, --truecolor — enables 24-bit truecolor mode. the full spectrum, no compromise 👑
• -f, --force — force color even when stdout is not a tty. stubborn in the best way 🫶
• -v, --version — shows the lolcat version 🏷️
• -h, --help — shows the options summary 📋

🌸 EXAMPLES 🌸

typical combinations of lolcat include other programs that generate text. like, it's a whole ecosystem bestie.

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

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

cat(1), toilet(1), fortune(6), cowsay(6)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

lolcat was written by Moe <moe@busyloop.net>. iconic behavior, honestly.

this manual page was originally written by chrysn <chrysn@fsfe.org>, for the Debian project. very quickly revamped by Mathieu Aubin <mathieu@zeroserieux.com> to include as part of the official code repository. slay 🫶

and that's the whole vibe check — this page is from the Games Manual, dated April 4, 2019, and yes it's still LOLCAT(6) at heart 💖🌈✨