On Jan 23, 2004, Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto <hlen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This happens all the time: after an intricate find, I decide > to grep something out of that very same find, for instance. It > would be nice to have some tweak to reuse the last output without > having to run the command again. Anyone? Such output is not really saved anywhere. Were the shell to actually save it, it would have to intercept stdout (and stderr?) of the application it runs and record the outputs somewhere it could replay them. Should you want to distinguish stdout from stderr, the shell would have to maintain two such buffers, and synchronization of their outputs would no longer be possible, i.e., you could get out-of-order output on your screen depending on how the shell interceptors happened to be scheduled. Not a good idea. Not to mention that it would make the shell significantly less efficient: consider a program whose output is huge. You surely don't want this to be kept in memory (or even on disk) if it's not to be used afterwards. Just collecting all this output would waste a lot of CPU. There's this rule about optimizing for the common case. Common case is to output to the output terminal and be done with it. If you need its output, just run it again. Now, if you really want to be able to take the output of some random program you ran and feed that into another program, there are ways to do that. Start GNU screen, or a shell within GNU Emacs, or just use some terminal program with a configurable scrollback buffer and, whenever you need the output of some other program, you can scroll back and cut&paste the output into the input of another program. No need to build such abilities into the shell. -- Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Happy GNU Year! oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist Professional serial bug killer
