😼 fcat

fcat, short for fastcat, is a cat implementation in Rust using Linux's splice syscall.
With that little trick, it's more than three times as fast as the system cat in our benchmarks.
Read the announcement here.

cat myfile | pv -r > /dev/null
[1.90GiB/s]

fcat myfile | pv -r > /dev/null
[5.90GiB/s]

Installation

Note: Only works on Linux.
(But you can send me a pull request for other operating systems.)

cargo install fcat

Usage

fcat file1 file2 file3

Project goals

• Be the fastest cat in town.
• Be a drop-in replacement for (POSIX) cat.

Non-goals

• Provide any additional functionality other than what cat provides.
  If you're looking for a more beautiful cat, check out bat.

Known issues

If you run fcat /dev/zero >> myfile, it will fail with exit code EINVAL because, according to the splice manpage: "The target file is opened in append mode."

Trivia

• You probably won't ever need this, but it's a fun little experiment.
  Still, I wonder why this is not part of e.g. GNU cat...
• What I like the most about the project is the logo.

License

fcat is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.