Misleading phrasing about $! in documentation
I think our documentation on $! is a little misleading. `man bash' states: Special Parameters The shell treats several parameters specially. These parameters may only be referenced; assignment to them is not allowed. [...] ! Expands to the process ID of the most recently executed background (asynchronous) command. I don't think this statement is true. Take this as an example: $ sleep 60 ^Z [1]+ Stopped sleep 60 $ sleep 60 & [2] 6580 $ bg [1]+ sleep 60 & $ echo "$!" 6579 The pipeline with the PID referenced by $! was not executed last, it was merely backgrounded last. I suggest s/executed background/backgrounded/. If this is accepted as valid, I will happily write and attach a patch. Best, Chris pgpUkRpRHbYxG.pgp Description: PGP signature
feature request: capture output of last command and make it available on some hotkey
Hi, i think this would be a very useful feature and i don't seem to be alone: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955577/bash-automatically-capture-output-of-last-executed-command-into-a-variable http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/9024/how-do-i-reuse-the-last-output-from-the-command-line There are a lot of hackish solutions how you could achieve this, but since readline actually provides the yank-last-arg it would somehow be cool to also have a yank-last-output-line, maybe on M-, instead of M-. As outputs might get pretty big, maybe bash could remember up to the the first and last 10 lines of output of the previous command. After that counting usually gets slower than using another approach anyhow. Use cases: - type some command, realize you want to do something with the last line of the output, for example view the path written there, type "less ", hit [esc] [,], done… - whenever you used your mouse to copy that one line from the last output just to reinsert it after the command you just typed. Cheers, Jörn
Re: feature request: capture output of last command and make it available on some hotkey
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 02:09:23AM +0200, Jörn Hees wrote: > i think this would be a very useful feature and i don't seem to be alone: > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955577/bash-automatically-capture-output-of-last-executed-command-into-a-variable Bash has no knowledge of, and no way to interact with, commands that it spawns. When bash runs a command (e.g. "cat file"), bash merely makes sure that stdout and the other file descriptors are properly aligned, and then calls exec(). It is the command itself (cat) which actually does the writing, and it writes directly to the terminal, or the pipeline, or wherever stdout is set to go. Bash can't "capture" this in a variable. Your TERMINAL might be able to cough up output on demand, but bash is completely unaware of the output.
