bamtools ☆

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Description:
C++ API and command-line toolkit for BAM data

Type: Formula | Latest Version: 2.5.3@0 | Tracked Since: Dec 17, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: bioinformatics genomics bam c++ sequencing

Install: brew install bamtools

About:
Bamtools provides a powerful C++ API and a suite of command-line utilities for reading, writing, and manipulating BAM files, the binary format for aligned sequence data. It simplifies genomic data processing by abstracting away the complexities of the underlying file format. This toolkit is essential for bioinformaticians developing custom scripts or pipelines for next-generation sequencing analysis.

Key Features:

Comprehensive C++ API for BAM file manipulation
Efficient command-line tools for file conversion and statistics
Header and alignment parsing with easy access to metadata
Supports sorting, indexing, and merging operations

Use Cases:

Parsing BAM files within custom bioinformatics software
Converting SAM files to BAM format for storage efficiency
Extracting specific alignment regions or read groups for downstream analysis

Alternatives:

samtools – Samtools is the industry standard with broader functionality, while Bamtools is often preferred for its cleaner C++ API integration.
pysam – Pysam offers Python bindings for htslib, whereas Bamtools provides a native C++ solution without Python dependencies.

License: MIT

Dependencies: jsoncpp

Bottles available for: arm64_tahoe, arm64_sequoia, arm64_sonoma, arm64_ventura, sonoma, ventura, arm64_linux, x86_64_linux

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 11, 2025 5:13am		0	VERSION_BUMP	64b8ae17