In producer mode kafkacat reads messages from stdin, delimited with a configurable delimiter (-D, defaults to newline), and produces them to the provided Kafka cluster (-b), topic (-t) and partition (-p).

In consumer mode kafkacat reads messages from a topic and partition and prints them to stdout using the configured message delimiter.

There's also support for the Kafka >=0.9 high-level balanced consumer, use the -G switch and provide a list of topics to join the group.

kafkacat also features a Metadata list (-L) mode to display the current state of the Kafka cluster and its topics and partitions.

kafkacat is fast and lightweight; statically linked it is no more than 150Kb.