Mew

A cat clone, built the right way

POSIX cat rebuilt in strict C11 with zero dependencies — sanitizers in debug, careful error handling, and no surprises.

+Strict C11 — Compiled under strict flags
+Zero dependencies — Nothing beyond POSIX
+ASAN + UBSAN — Sanitized in debug builds

view source ↗free

What it is

cat, rebuilt from scratch in C11. No printf, no stdio buffering: the core is four syscalls and a write loop that handles partial writes, so every byte reaches the output or the error is reported.

Beyond cat

-r / --line-range prints part of a file and answers the sed -n '10,40p' question natively:

mew -r 2:4 notes.md            # lines 2 to 4
mew -n -r 30:32 main.c         # numbered 30, 31, 32
mew -r :2 -r 10: CHANGELOG.md  # head and tail in one pass

Line numbers keep each line's position in the file, overlapping ranges merge, and reading stops after the last wanted line, so mew -r 1:5 on a multi-gigabyte log reads five lines.

Correctness

The GNU cat flag set with long options, including -v notation across the full byte range
Errors on stderr as mew: <file>: <reason>, including write failures and directory arguments
--color[=auto|always|never] for mew's own output, never the file contents, and NO_COLOR always wins
Debug builds run under AddressSanitizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer
The test suite compares output byte for byte against system cat, and CI fails if a flag ships without documentation

Install

$ git clone https://github.com/NoamFav/Mew.git && cd Mew$ make release$ make install        # binary + man page, PREFIX=/usr/local

Status

[x]Full cat flag set with long options
[x]Line ranges
[x]Colour output with NO_COLOR support
[x]Man page and CI on two OSes and two compilers

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