LOLCAT(6) Games Manual LOLCAT(6)

lolcat - rainbow coloring effect for text console display

lolcat [options] [files] ...

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.

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).
Frequency of the rainbow effect.
(low values around 0.0001 give almost monochromous screens; default: 0.1).
Initial value for the random number generator; 0 means automatic.
(default: 0).
Fade every line through an animation before printing the next one.
Duration of the animation.
(number of steps before showing next line; default: 12)
Speed of the animation.
(frame rate, ie. number of steps per second; default: 20)
Inverts the background and foreground colors.
Enables 24-bit truecolor mode.
Force color even when stdout is not a tty.
Shows lolcat version.
Shows options summary.

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

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

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

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 official code repository.

April 4, 2019