An Implementation of the Unix “cat” Program

Concepts

• Use the Deno runtime API to output the contents of a file to the console.
• Deno.args accesses the command line arguments.
• Deno.open is used to get a handle to a file.
• copy is used to transfer data from the file to the output stream.
• Files should be closed when you are finished with them
• Modules can be run directly from remote URLs.

Example

In this program each command-line argument is assumed to be a filename, the file is opened, and printed to stdout (e.g. the console).

/**
 * cat.ts
 */
import { copy } from "https://deno.land/std@0.167.0/streams/conversion.ts";
for (const filename of Deno.args) {
  const file = await Deno.open(filename);
  await copy(file, Deno.stdout);
  file.close();
}

To run the program:

deno run --allow-read https://deno.land/std@0.167.0/examples/cat.ts /etc/passwd