lolcat(6)

lolcat6

Rainbow coloring effect for text console display

Usage

lolcat [options] [files] ...

Overview

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 X, --spread=X

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 X, --freq=X

Frequency of the rainbow effect.
(low values around 0.0001 give almost monochromous screens; default: 0.1).

-S X, --seed=X

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 X, --duration=X

Duration of the animation.
(number of steps before showing next line; default: 12)

-s X, --speed=X

Speed of the animation.
(frame rate, ie. number of steps per second; default: 20)

-i, --invert

Inverts the background and foreground colors.

-t, --truecolor

Enables 24-bit truecolor mode.

-f, --force

Force color even when stdout is not a tty.

-v, --version

Shows lolcat version.

-h, --help

Shows options summary.

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

Releases

7 releases since Debian 8 (Jessie); the text changed 1 time.

  1. 8–10
  2. 11–Arch

--invert since Debian 11 (Bullseye); --truecolor since Debian 11 (Bullseye); -i since Debian 11 (Bullseye); -t since Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Author

lolcat was written by Moe <[email protected]>.

This manual page was originally written by chrysn <[email protected]>, for the Debian project.
Very quickly revamped by Mathieu Aubin <[email protected]> to include as part of official code repository.

From lolcat 100.0.1-5 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.