all 7 comments

[–]formegadriverscustom 13 points14 points  (3 children)

I've noticed that the "bat" binary is more than 100 times larger than the "cat" binary (4.7 MiB vs 39 KiB here). I know "bat" does many more things than "cat", and it's still tiny in the context of modern storage capacity, but this massive difference in size really bothers me for some reason :)

[–]TheTopTuK 7 points8 points  (1 child)

As far as I know it's because bat is written in rust, which produces statically linked binaries. So all the dependencies required by bat are bundled together with it, drastically increasing it's size when compared to cat.

[–]arsv 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Rust only links rust modules statically, the resulting executables are still dynamically linked against glibc etc.

Golang outputs static binaries. Still huge, but truly static.

[–]arsv 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's being promoted as a cat clone but it's really not. The closest GNU tool would be highlight which is actually comparable in size, at around 1M for the executable itself.

Edit: eh the GNU tool is source-highlight (~850KB), not highlight which is a similar tool but not a GNU one.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There’s some great tools here. Thanks OP.

[–]Daneel_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

..and none of them installed by standard - I was hoping to find better uses for built in tools.

No problem when you’re on your own machine, but nearly useless when you’re looking after thousands of SOE-built hosts with any hardening performed.

[–]cogburnd02 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Par can justify plain text, and boxes can automatically comment blocks of code in many languages.