RustCat

RustCat is an enhanced reimplementation of the Unix cat command, offering advanced features for modern use cases. It is designed to provide powerful capabilities for file concatenation, line numbering, file search, and more, while maintaining a user-friendly command-line interface. Currently, RustCat works with only files and does not work with standard input. RustCat reimplements most of the original cat features and adds additional features.

Extended Features

• Search Functionality: Allows users to search and highlight specific terms within a file.
• Syntax Highlighting: Utilizes the syntect library for accurate syntax highlighting in various programming languages.

Installation

To install RustCat, ensure Rust is installed on your system. Then use cargo to install:

cargo install rustcat

How to Use

RustCat includes numerous command-line options for flexible file processing:

• Display File: rustcat file - Standard file display.
• Concatenate Files: rustcat file1 file2... - Concatenate and display multiple files.
• Number Non-Blank Lines: rustcat -b file or rustcat --number-nonblank file - Number non-blank lines only. This overrides -n
• Display Non-Printing Characters:
  • rustcat -e file or rustcat --show-nonprinting-and-ends file - Show non-printing characters and $ at line end. It is the same as -vE.
  • rustcat -t file or rustcat --show-nonprinting-and-tabs file - Display non-printing characters with tabs as ^I. This is the same as -vT.
  • rustcat -v file or rustcat --show-nonprinting file - Display control characters and non-ASCII characters in a visible format.
• Show Ends/Tabs:
  • rustcat -E file or rustcat --show-ends file - Display $ at the end of each line.
  • rustcat -T file or rustcat --show-tabs file - Show TAB characters as ^I.
• Number All Lines: rustcat -n fileor rustcat --number file - Number all output lines.
• Squeeze Blank Lines: rustcat -s file or rustcat --squeeze-blank file - Suppress multiple consecutive empty lines.
• Show All: ruscat -A file or rustcat --show-all file is the same as -vET.
• Syntax Highlighting: ruscat -x file or rustcat --highlight filename.rs - Syntax highlighting (the syntax highlight is for .rs extensions but the highlighting also works for .py)
• Search in File: rustcat -f "search term" file or rustcat --search "search term" file - Highlight a specified search term within a file.
• Help and Version Info:
  • rustcat --help - Display detailed usage instructions.
  • rustcat --version - Show the current version of RustCat.

Testing

RustCat undergoes thorough integration testing, comparing its output with the Unix cat command to ensure feature compatibility and correctness.

Next Steps

The next steps for this project would be the following:

1. Display input from standard input in addition to files.
2. Additional integration tests (search, multiple files, displaying standard input, syntax highlighting, highlighting search word)

Acknowledgements

This project was developed with the aid of ChatGPT. Here are some of the ChatGPT links:

1. https://chat.openai.com/share/d35634d7-16e1-433d-9875-6510562d052b
2. https://chat.openai.com/share/d35634d7-16e1-433d-9875-6510562d052b
3. https://chat.openai.com/share/06abcfb0-4af8-4ecb-b156-6a542f5792b1 I also utilized the manual for Unix and Linux:
4. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/cat.1.html
5. https://ss64.com/bash/cat.html
6. https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/cat/
7. man cat in Unix and Linux.

License

RustCat is available under the MIT License.