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jbranchaud
29 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
29 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
# Print Out File With Bat Without Formatting
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The [`bat`](https://github.com/sharkdp/bat) utility is my daily driver and
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replacement for anything used `cat` for before. I even have `bat` aliased to
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`cat` so that I never had to rewire my muscle memory for typing `cat`.
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Whether or not the creator of `cat` intended it, I'd guess that most terminal
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users' main use case is printing the contents of a file. `bat` does that way
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better with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and some layout formatting that
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puts lines around the output and a heading with the filename.
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All this formatting is great when I'm taking a quick look at a file. One way it
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gets in the way is when I'm trying to highlight and copy a few lines to my
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clipboard. Because the terminal is rendering lines, line numbers, and other
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formatting, all that fluff gets included on the clipboard.
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For this scenario, I can use the `-p` flag (or `--style=plain`) to print just
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the (syntax-highlighted) file contents without all the extra formatting.
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```bash
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bat -p app/models/users.rb
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# or
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bat --style=plain app/models/users.rb
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```
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Another way I could have approached this was to [ignore the alias of `cat` to
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`bat`](ignore-the-alias-when-running-a-command.md).
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