fatcat
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FAT filesystems explore, extract, repair, and forensic tool - Gregwar/fatcat
Summary
fatcat is an open-source command-line tool for exploring, extracting, repairing, and recovering FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 filesystem images, aimed at forensic analysts and incident responders who need to work directly with disk images rather than a mounted filesystem. It takes an image file as an argument, with options to list directory contents including deleted files, read a file out to stdout, extract the whole filesystem to a directory, or compare and back up the FAT tables, so a single binary covers both investigation and repair. It sits in the disk-forensics category alongside other filesystem-specific recovery utilities rather than general-purpose imaging suites. Development goes back to 2013 with 8 contributors, but there have been no commits in the past year, so treat it as stable but no longer actively maintained.
FAT filesystems explore, extract, repair, and forensic tool - Gregwar/fatcat
How fatcat helps
What files exist on this disk image, including ones someone tried to delete?
lists directory contents cluster by cluster and flags deleted entries alongside live ones, with size and modification date for each
Can I get one file off this image without restoring the whole thing?
reads a single file straight to standard output by path or by cluster number, so it can be redirected straight into another file or tool
Can I recover this whole volume's contents somewhere I can browse them normally?
walks the filesystem structure and writes every directory and file it finds out to a real directory on disk
Do the two copies of the file allocation table on this image agree with each other?
compares the primary and backup FAT and reports where they diverge, pointing at corruption a mounted view would hide
Is there a second partition or filesystem hiding further into this image?
takes a byte offset into the image so a FAT structure starting partway through a multi-partition disk can be read on its own
What does the overall layout of this filesystem look like before I start digging into individual files?
prints the filesystem's own metadata, giving a summary view to orient an investigation before listing or extracting anything
Languages
Command line
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail fatcat puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
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Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in Gregwar/fatcat, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 −1 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 15 of 20 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 15
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 326
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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