bincat is a simple program that, given one or more files, prints the bits of each byte in a file on one line. bincat outputs one line per file, and does not print spaces between sequences of eight bits or any other characters.

bincat is a small program written in the spirit of the UNIX philosophy. For this reason, it is written to be efficient and to be as general a tool as possible. For example, if you want to see the binary values of each byte in a file on its own line, you can pipe the output of bincat to the fold program on your favorite shell:

bincat myfile.txt | fold -w 8

bincat is also useful for viewing "packed" binary data. If you have a binary file containing sequences of 5 bits, for example, you could use bincat and fold in a manner similar to the above, by specifying that fold use a column width of 5.