rucat is a cat-like command line utility that combines the contents of multiple files, directories, or standard input into a single structured output.
It’s aimed at developers and system administrators who need to inspect source trees, gather repository context, or prepare clearly separated text blocks for documentation, scripting, and AI-assisted workflows. The program keeps file boundaries visible and can send output straight to the clipboard, which makes it useful when moving terminal content into editors, chats, or other tools.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports multiple output formats including Markdown, JSON, XML, ASCII, ANSI, UTF-8 box layouts, and a pretty mode with syntax highlighting.
- Can process multiple files and directories recursively, and can also read from standard input for use in shell pipelines.
- Accepts NUL-terminated file lists with the
-0option, which is useful with commands such asfind -print0. - Offers optional line numbering and configurable path stripping to make output easier to read in larger projects.
- Can copy output directly to the clipboard, with support for Linux clipboard environments including X11 and Wayland as well as terminal escape sequence providers.
- Includes configuration via a TOML file so default formatting options can be customised.
Website: github.com/brianredbeard/rucat
Support:
Developer: Brian ‘redbeard’ Harrington
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
rucat is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| 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 |
| umber | Designed to replace cat for reading source code and other text files |
| rucat | Aimed at developers and system administrators |
| peek | Multi-buffer terminal pager |
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