show file content | bat cheat-sheet

What is bat ? 🔗

Print and concatenate files. A cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

Common usage patterns 🔗

Pretty print the contents of one or more files to the standard output (a.k.a. stdout):

bat path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

Concatenate several files into the target file:

bat path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... > path/to/target_file

Remove decorations and disable paging (--style plain can be replaced with -p, or both options with -pp):

bat --style plain --pager never path/to/file

Highlight a specific line or a range of lines with a different background color:

bat [-H|--highlight-line] 10|5:10|:10|10:|10:+5 path/to/file

Show non-printable characters like space, tab or newline:

bat [-A|--show-all] path/to/file

Remove all decorations except line numbers in the output:

bat [-n|--number] path/to/file

Syntax highlight a JSON file by explicitly setting the language:

bat [-l|--language] json path/to/file.json

Display all supported languages:

bat [-L|--list-languages]

Notes 🔗

• bat is distributed as batcat via APT package manager. Why?

Here is the answer:

In this package the executable and its manpage have been renamed from ‘bat’ to ‘batcat’ because of a file name clash with another Debian package.

• For more information, checkout the source code and documentation on GitHub: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat .

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