BAT – the intelligent cat

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Every now and then I run into a handy little tool which makes life on the command line just a bit easier. This is one of them: bat

Bat makes your text files look like this:
Syntax highlighting with bat
That’s a lot prettier than just looking at it with cat and the line numbers are very convenient when you got an error message that there was a problem in line 267.

Although bat is included in a lot of standard OS repositories these days, it’s not included in the repositories of Centos/RedHat/Fedora. That means it needs to be installed from the source. This script does exactly that.


#!/bin/sh

red=`tput setaf 1`
green=`tput setaf 2`
bold=`tput bold`
reset=`tput sgr0`

echo ""
echo "${bold}${green}Installing the latest CentOS release version of bat command from GitHub...${reset}"

echo ""
echo "${bold}Note${reset}: For more information, please see https://github.com/sharkdp/bat."

echo ""
echo "Finding the latest version tag from Github..."

BAT_VERSION=$(curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/sharkdp/bat/releases/latest" | grep -Eo '"tag_name": "v(.*)"' | sed -E 's/.*"([^"]+)".*/\1/')
BAT_RELEASE="bat-$BAT_VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl"
BAT_ARCHIVE="$BAT_RELEASE.tar.gz"

echo ""
echo "Version ${bold}$BAT_VERSION${reset} found, downloading ${bold}$BAT_ARCHIVE${reset} from GitHub..."

curl -sOL "https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/releases/download/$BAT_VERSION/$BAT_ARCHIVE"

echo ""
echo "Unarchiving ${bold}$BAT_ARCHIVE${reset} to ${bold}$HOME/$BAT_RELEASE${reset}..."

tar xzvf $BAT_ARCHIVE -C $HOME/

echo ""
echo "Copying executable to ${bold}/usr/local/bin/bat${reset}..."

sudo sh -c "cp $HOME/$BAT_RELEASE/bat /usr/local/bin/bat"

echo ""
echo "Removing ${bold}$BAT_ARCHIVE${reset} and cleaning up..."

rm $BAT_ARCHIVE

unset BAT_ARCHIVE
unset BAT_RELEASE
unset BAT_VERSION

if command -v bat &> /dev/null
then
  echo ""
  echo "${bold}${green}Finished installing $(bat --version).${reset}"
else
  echo ""
  echo "${bold}${red}Installation failed! Please examine this script and try steps manually.${reset}"
  exit 1
fi

Make it executable and run it. Afterwards you can use it by simply using bat <file> instead of cat <file>. It leaves a directory in the home-directory of your current user, which you can remove. This directory also contains bat-versions for the zsh and fish shells.