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A 3x faster implementation of cat, using splice

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😼 fcat

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fastcat logo

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.

⚠️ This project is currently broken on newer Linux versions (5.9+) because of some changes
concerning the splice system call. (See here and here.) This can't be fixed unless changes to the kernel get made.

Performance

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

at your option.

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A 3x faster implementation of cat, using splice

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Apache-2.0, MIT licenses found

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MIT
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