This article spotlights alternative tools to cat.
cat derives its name from concatenation and provides other nifty options too. For example, it can be be used to write contents to a file by typing them from the terminal itself.
Enterprising users will appreciate you can display the contents of a file using the shell builtin read.
The software featured here is free and open source. All tools provide a command-line interface (CLI) unless otherwise stated.
| Alternatives to cat | |
|---|---|
| bat | Super charged cat - Features in our Top 100 CLI Apps |
| mdcat | Sophisticated Markdown rendering for the terminal - Features in our Top 100 TUI Apps |
| grcat | Frontend for generic colouriser grc |
| tac | Concatenate and print files in reverse |
| ccat | Colorizing cat |
| see | Cute cat replacement |
| lolcat | Add some zest to the cat command. Features in our Linux Candy series |
| kat | cat command that almost tastes like chocolate |
| meow | Renders text using your existing Neovim configuration |
| mcat | Extended cat command |
| batdoc | cat for Office documents and PDFs |
Why is tac included when both cat and tac are part of Coreutils? Well, tac is the reverse of cat. We can pipe the output of tac to tac, which is equivalent to cat. Many other tools let you cat files as well.
Have we missed any open source alternatives to cat? Please let us know!
All the CLI tools in this series.
| Alternatives to CLI tools |
|---|
| age // awk // bc // cal // cat // cd // chmod // cksum // cloc // cmp // compress // cp // cron // curl // cut // date // dd // df // diff // dig // du // fdisk // find // free // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // stow // strings // sudo // sysctl // tail // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
I’d add ccat, a Go tool that colorizes cat.
It appears unmaintained, but it’s still worth adding. Thanks Michael.
There’s the Rust-based see utility
Thanks, we’ll add see shortly.
see is now included.
Debian had a “dog” package for many years, described as “Enhanced replacement for cat”. I think they removed it to avoid confusion when the “dog” DNS client (a “dig” alternative) stated gaining traction, but it can still be found in the archives. Full package description below:
dog writes the contents of each given file, URL or standard
input to standard output. It currently supports file, http
and raw URLs. It is designed as a compatible, but enhanced
replacement for cat.
If I’m thinking of the same software, it hasn’t been updated for 9 years. Not sure we’ll add it. But thanks for your suggestion.