susonicth / zigcat

As a lerning exercise to get to know zig I build a small command line tool that works like cat

zigcat

As a lerning exercise to get to know zig I build a small command line tool that works like cat. Most GNU cat commandline options are implemented.

Missing options (all depend on --show-nonprinting)

• -A, --show-all
• -e
• -t
• -v, --show-nonprinting

Feedback from more experienced zig developers is verry welcome. If you find any bug or you see some non-idiomatic costructs please let me know.

Usage

see src/USAGE.txt

Licence

zigcat is licenced under the MIT licence

see src/LICENSE.txt

Build requirements

To build zigcat you just need the zig compiler, which can be downloaded from https://ziglang.org/download/

There is no installation needed, just download the package for your operating system an extract the archive and add it to your PATH

Windows example

execute following commands in a windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe)

curl https://ziglang.org/builds/zig-windows-x86_64-0.11.0-dev.3777+64f0059cd.zip --output zig.zip
tar -xf zig.zip
del zig.zip
move zig-windows-x86_64* zig
set PATH=%cd%\zig;%PATH%

Linux example

execute following commands in a shell

curl https://ziglang.org/builds/zig-linux-x86_64-0.11.0-dev.3777+64f0059cd.tar.xz --output zig.tar.xz
tar -xf zig.tar.xz
rm zig.tar.xz
mv zig-linux-x86_64* zig
export PATH=$(pwd)/zig:$PATH

Build

If you have zig installed and on your PATH just cd into the directory and execute zig build

The first build takes a while and when it's finished you'll find the executeable (zigcat or zigcat.exe) in zig-out/bin/

You can run the built-in uinit tests with zig build test If everything is ok you will see no output.

Or you can run zig test src/main.zig that should give you the output "All 9 tests passed." if everything is OK.