vbat

Korean

Enhanced wrapper for bat that adds wildcard support and flexible encoding handling for viewing text files across platforms.

Supported entrypoints

• vbat.cmd — Windows (CMD) launcher that forwards to PowerShell
• vbat.ps1 — PowerShell script (Windows)
• vbat.sh — POSIX shell script (Linux/macOS)

Requirements

• bat (shorthand pager) must be installed and available on PATH.
  • A cat(1) clone with wings. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

Quick usage

• Windows (CMD):
  • vbat.cmd myfile.txt
• PowerShell:
  • . vbat.ps1 myfile.txt (or run vbat.cmd from CMD)
• Bash (Linux/macOS):
  • ./vbat.sh myfile.txt

Options

• --encoding=VALUE or -e VALUE — override encoding for files (e.g. UTF-8, CP949, EUC-KR).
• -h or --help — show usage help.

.encoding sidecar files Each target text file may have a sidecar file named <filename>.encoding that contains a line like:

encoding=UTF8

The scripts will prefer an explicit --encoding argument, then a .encoding sidecar, and finally fall back to a sensible default (PowerShell/CMD variants default to CP949; the shell script defaults to UTF-8).

Examples

• View all .txt files with default behavior:
  • vbat.ps1 *.txt
• Force UTF-8 for a single file:
  • vbat.sh myfile.txt --encoding=UTF-8
• Use short flag:
  • vbat.cmd myfile.txt -e CP949

Notes

• The Windows vbat.cmd is a tiny launcher that invokes PowerShell with the same logic as vbat.ps1.
• The shell script uses iconv to convert encodings before piping into bat.
• If you see an "unsupported encoding" error, either install the required encoding support (platform-specific) or use a different encoding value.

Troubleshooting

• Ensure bat is on your PATH and callable as bat.
• On Windows, run PowerShell scripts according to your execution policy, or use vbat.cmd to avoid changing policies.

See the individual scripts for full implementation details.