batcat has been renamed to bat in Debian

[Tachi107]

Hi, the bat utility has been finally moved back to /usr/bin/bat from /usr/bin/batcat, as the package that used to "own" /usr/bin/bat hasn't been part of Debian for a couple of years. See https://bugs.debian.org/1029096 for the relevant Debian bug report.

This means that most likely the batcat workaround won't be needed in Debian 12 and Ubuntu 23.04 (not released yet), and it might make sense to mention this already in the README.

Related to #982

[sharkdp]

Oh this is great news! Thank you for posting here. I agree that we should already prepare for these changes.

[nabajour]

FYI, I updated my Debian unstable and bat wasn't working again. Due to this bugfix:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1029504

If I understand this correctly, the naming still conflicts with another executable (/usr/sbin/bat) from bacula-console-qt.

I don't know what the most debianic way to get this to work is, without making a manual symlink that's not managed by the packaging system. I'm not using bacula.

For now, I tried the alternative system:

 $ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/bat bat /usr/bin/batcat 50

But I might be strong-arming it by using the system in the opposite way than it was intended, as it's supposed to help selecting between multiple binaries providing the same functionalities. So this is probably useless and not different to a manual symlink.

[jvschiavo]

I think our best bet to solve this issue would be trying to convince bacula developers to change the /usr/sbin/bat filename upstream, maybe to /usr/sbin/bacula-bat.

So after a version of Debian with the bat command free, the bat project could make use of it on the next release.

Example:
Debian Bookworm: /usr/sbin/bat is part of bacula-console-qt (/usr/bin/bat is free)
Debian Trixie: both /usr/sbin/bat and /usr/bin/bat are free (to avoid confusion for upgrading bacula users to mistakenly run the wrong software)
Debian Forky: /usr/bin/bat is part of the bat package

In the transitional release (Trixie in this example) we could also replace the /usr/bin/bat (and symlink /usr/sbin/bat to it) with some info about this.

Something like:

#!/usr/bin/sh
echo 'This command used to be part of the "bacula-console-qt" package, and it's going to be part of the "bat" package on the next stable version of Debian.'
echo 'If you want to use the previous bat command from bacula-console-qt, please run "bacula-bat" as root.'
echo 'If you want to use the cat-like command from the bat package, please run "batcat".'
echo
echo 'You can also add an alias or a symlink for either of these commands. Example:'
echo
echo 'Alias:'
echo "echo 'alias bat="/usr/bin/batcat"' >> ~/.bashrc"
echo 'Local symlink for your user only:'
echo 'ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat'
echo
echo 'Symlink for the whole system (needs root permission):'
echo 'ln -s /usr/bin/batcat /usr/bin/bat'
echo 'or for bacula:'
echo 'ln -s /usr/sbin/bacula-bat /usr/sbin/bat'