Last Updated on June 4, 2023
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 |
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 // find // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // strings // sudo // sysctl // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
I’d add ccat, a Go tool that colorizes cat.
It appears unmaintained, but it’s still worth adding. Thanks Michael.