# kafkacat > Apache Kafka producer and consumer tool. > More information: . - Consume messages starting with the newest offset: `kafkacat -C -t {{topic}} -b {{brokers}}` - Consume messages starting with the oldest offset and exit after the last message is received: `kafkacat -C -t {{topic}} -b {{brokers}} -o beginning -e` - Consume messages as a Kafka consumer group: `kafkacat -G {{group_id}} {{topic}} -b {{brokers}}` - Publish message by reading from stdin: ` echo {{message}} | kafkacat -P -t {{topic}} -b {{brokers}}` - Publish messages by reading from a file: `kafkacat -P -t {{topic}} -b {{brokers}} {{path/to/file}}` - List metadata for all topics and brokers: `kafkacat -L -b {{brokers}}` - List metadata for a specific topic: `kafkacat -L -t {{topic}} -b {{brokers}}` - Get offset for a topic/partition for a specific point in time: `kafkacat -Q -t {{topic}}:{{partition}}:{{unix_timestamp}} -b {{brokers}}`