7 ms·
CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops
- renewiltord 2y agoI also pipe to `ts` and successors since that gives me a running timer of when the last thing happened. It’s in moreutils.
- tetris11 2y agopretty cool idea, wish I had thought of it.
- woodruffw 2y agoVery nice! I’m one of those habitual return-pressers, and this tool accomplishes the exact same thing but better.
- mbreese 2y agoYeah, if I have a stuck output (that doesn’t include a date), I’ll sometimes hit return, and add `# 12/23/24 10:37` and hit return again. That way I know when I last looked at it. This tool might be nicer, but I’m not sure if know when I’d need to use it a priori.
- withinboredom 2y agoAt least in zsh, you can do `exec > >(spacer)` but it seems to break the tty by stripping control characters from input.
- imp0cat 2y agoI like to pressing Enter - like an animal -, too! :) It puts spaces exactly wheere I want them.
- stavros 2y agoI love it when someone has a problem I have very often, but they have the insight to actually realize that it's a problem, and then do something about it.
- thih9 2y agoSays the person who built a website listing games with fair pricing[1] and more. You’re guilty of that yourself. Much appreciated too! [1]: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
- stavros 2y agoHaha, thanks! Yes, sometimes I do it too, but for this spacing thing I kept hitting enter and never realized this was an actual problem that I could do something about! Also, I have to say, getting a 3D printer has definitely done this for things around the house. Every small niggle that used to fly under the radar and tolerated now has a tiny plastic thing fixing it once and for all.
- Levitating 2y agoI am disappointed I couldn't find any of the OPUS games by SIGONO on your website. Though I think some (or at least OPUS: The Day We Found Earth) were temporarily removed from the play store.
- stavros 2y agoI am disappointed you didn't submit it!
- wruza 2y agoRealizing is not the hardest part, imo. I avoid publishing my little subprojects/libs/funcs simply because of the burden of publishing maintenance, and that is before connecting with people about issues, frs and so on. Our packaging tradition feels more like a marketplace (with all quirks and procedures) rather than a place where you can just share code and let anyone use it.
- stavros 2y agoI think that's you. I just dump all my code in the open, without feeling any obligation.
- westurner 2y ago- In Python, Sarge has code to poll stdout and stderr - Years ago for timesheets, I created a "gap report" that finds when the gap between the last dated events exceeds a threshold. - The vscode terminal indicates which stdout, stderr are from which process with a circle . This says it's "Integrated > Shell Integration: Decorations Enabled" to configure the feature; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73242939/vscode-remove-circle-next-to-terminal https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73242939/vscode-remove-c... - Are there other shells that indicate which stdout and stderr are from which process? What should it do about e.g. reset ANSI shell escape sequences?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Tsiklon 2y agoAs an aside I have foolishly never once thought that you could pipe both stdout and stderr to another program at the same time. You learn something new each day.
- pixelmonkey 2y agoI knew you could do that, but never knew you could do it with "|&" as a shorthand. TIL! I found this comment in a bash documentation example to verify: # To send stderr through a pipe, "|&" was added to Bash 4 as an abbreviation for "2>&1 |".
- cmeacham98 2y agoFair warning - this is a bash-ism, so if you're writing a script that needs to run on multiple shells and/or a more primitive shell, you should avoid it.
- zmw 2y agoRelated shameless plug: I have a small tool that prepends each output line with a timestamp (can be absolute, relative, or elapsed since last line), might be useful or pair well with this tool in similar scenarios (not needed when dealing with already timestamped logs, of course). https://github.com/zmwangx/ets https://github.com/zmwangx/ets
- fcoury 2y agoVery useful, thanks for sharing.
- grandchild 2y agoThere is also `ts` from moreutils[0]. One of a few gems there. And moreutils is (probably) already in "your" distro. [0] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
- ievans 2y agoLooks like the `ets` readme has a direct comparison: > The purpose of ets is similar to that of moreutils ts(1), but ets differentiates itself from similar offerings by running commands directly within ptys, hence solving thorny issues like pipe buffering and commands disabling color and interactive features when detecting a pipe as output. (ets does provide a reading-from-stdin mode if you insist.) ets also recognizes carriage return as a line seperator, so it doesn't choke if your command prints a progress bar. A more detailed comparison of ets and ts can be found below.
- ErikBjare 2y agoYet another fantastic joeyh project in my toolkit, thanks! (git-annex is awesome)
- 3eb7988a1663 2y agoThis seems great. Unfortunately, I will only recall it exists once I am into minute-unknown-but-way-too-long-for-comfort while waiting for a command to complete. Edit: Maybe you should highlight the trailing pipe example (eg `ping localhost | grep icmp | ets`)? That is way more convenient to use than the introductory samples indicate. Being able to slap it onto the end of a pipeline I am developing feels less invasive than potentially have to quote my command for the sake of a debugging tool.
- jaimehrubiks 2y agoI like it! but it would be even better as a shell's plugin maybe?
- croemer 2y agoWhen used with Python, it's important to add "PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1" env variable for this to work not just in the terminal but also when piping to files etc.
- Flimm 2y agoThe environment variable you're thinking of is `PYTHONUNBUFFERED`, not `UNBUFFERED` [0]. If you want a generic solution to this problem, try the `unbuffer` command [1]. For anyone who's interested, I recommend reading Julia Evan's article [2] about this problem and its solutions. [0]: https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONUNBUFFERED https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONUN... [1]: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man1/unbuffer.1.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man1/unbuffer.1.h... [2]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-buffering/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-bufferin...
- 3eb7988a1663 2y agoThe Julia article was a good read. Probably something I run into once a year, but glad to have a better understanding of it.
- croemer 2y agoJulia Evan's article is a great write-up indeed, I'll submit it as a main link. It's "Julia's article", not "The Julia article". Update: it is was on here just a month ago actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42275033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42275033
- overhead4075 2y agoA bit fancier than my awk version awk -W interactive 'BEGIN { t = systime(); } { u=systime(); if (u - t > 1) { printf("= %s %ds =========\n",strftime("%T"), u - t); }; print $0; t = u; }' Or if you want to clear the screen too awk -W interactive 'BEGIN { t = systime(); } { u=systime(); if (u - t > 1) { printf("\033[2J\033[H= %s %ds =========\n",strftime("%T"), u - t); }; print $0; t = u; }'
- Poiesis 2y agoJust to maybe save someone a couple of seconds of time: the '-W interactive' bit is a mawk-specific option (-W is for implementation-specific options). Not 100% certain but it looks like the gawk default does something similar so no additional option is needed, I think.
- hyperpape 2y agoIt really never ceases to amaze me how many basic affordances terminals lack, that we hack around with bash configuration or helper tools. Of course, I know it's a genuine hard area, and not one I've put any time into fixing, but it's also so high leverage--so many developers spend a ton of time in this environment.
- raron 2y agoKDE's Konsole has a feature to highlight "newly printed lines", but no timestamps. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1467849/what-is-the-bar-on-the-left-showing-in-konsole https://askubuntu.com/questions/1467849/what-is-the-bar-on-t...
- wruza 2y agoI find this bar annoying as hell, tbh, especially in interactive modes. Also Konsole messes up its ansi states all the time. It’s the only terminal in which I can hit <up>, sometimes see “~[[A;” or similar after my prompt, hit <enter> and it actually executes the previous command.
- Symbiote 2y agoSince it's KDE, there's naturally a setting to disable it.
- dv_dt 2y agoI would love a feature to scroll back to previous input lines, I don't think I ever found something that supports it (I haven't spent a lot of time searching for it admittedly)
- jandrese 2y agoAre you asking about something different than up-arrow or the 'history' command?
- 2y ago
- forrestthewoods 2y agoIt drives me batty that terminals don’t have a trivial way to “scroll to last command”.
- arusahni 2y agoSome do! For example, I used Wezterm, and it offers that capability [1]. [1]: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/keyassignment/ScrollToPrompt.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/keyassignment/Scro...
- jdoss 2y agoWoah! Thanks for pointing this feature out. This will be super handy to skip large amounts of output.
- abathur 2y agoTerminal.app on macOS can do this with Command + up-arrow. (IIRC this is technically just a hotkey for navigating marks or bookmarks or something, and it (book)marks each command.
- meatmanek 2y agoiTerm has this if you install the shell integration[1], which basically puts an escape code in your PS1 that tells iTerm where each command begins and ends. 1. https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html
- selendym 2y agoIn bash, you can do something like this out-of-the-box by setting the `PS1` variable to your liking. For example, I use the following in `/etc/bash.bashrc`: PROMPT_COMMAND='_prev_status="$?"' PS1='\n$(printf "%0${COLUMNS}d\n" 0 | tr 0 -)\n[\D{%y%m%d-%H%M%S}] \u@\H (${_prev_status})\n${PWD}\n\$ ' The first line saves the status of the previous command and the second line sets the prompt string. The result is something like this: ---------------------------------------- <these dashes span the terminal width> [date-time] user@host (status) /current/working/directory $ <next command>
- oldetimeyunix 2y agoI find it fascinating what new programmers prioritize. I’ve been developing on Unix and Unix like systems for 40 years and I’ve never needed a solution like this. But for some reason this appears to be a banger to some of you. Baffling but fascinating.
- IceDane 2y agoWhat is a "need"? I'm sure you can imagine why this could be useful. Is this life-changing? Does anyone need it? Probably not. Your comment just makes you come off as some narrow-minded, graybeard elitist, and possibly even a little bit dumb, given how obvious it is why this could be useful. "New programmers", etc. Why not just .. not comment instead? Literally the easiest thing in the world for you to do since it requires you to do nothing.
- wakawaka28 2y agoIf he thinks it's silly then he's welcome to say that. If someone with a lot of seniority wonders why you think you need a tool, maybe that's a hint that it isn't as obviously useful as you think. In this case, I get it, but a simple awk script can more or less do this work as well IF you think you need it.
- quasarj 2y agoYou've never ran tail -f? Curious, what exactly do you do?
- dpc_01234 2y agoNext level: Make it a wrapper `spacers ... cmd ...`. This way you can allocate PTY, and make the app believe it is still talking to the terminal and the use colors and alter its output in more fancy ways. BTW. Somewhat similiar (better sometimes) result can be achieved simply with: (echo "first"; sleep 1; echo "second"; sleep 0.5; echo "third") | ts -i "%.S" 00.000004 first 00.987787 second 00.501363 third
- nerflad 2y agoecho "printf '\n'" >> ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_right_prompt.fish....
- n144q 2y agoI have a similar but different need, wonder if anyone has the same frustrations and knows a solution: I often press enter key a few times to produce a noticeable gap between different runs of the same command. Yes, in theory, the shell prompt is enough to separate the runs, and I could customize the color, font etc, but that's still not as good as a few (almost) blank lines. The workflow is like this: often I need to run a command that produces a decent amount of output and repeat that a few times. Not 3 lines, not 1k lines, but something like 40-100 lines -- not short enough that I can easily see both the beginning and the end, not long enough that I have to log it to a file. I want to be able to scroll to the top of the output and read it. The "multiple enter key" approach works well enough, but is a bit repetitive and sometimes I forget to do that (then can't find where the output begins). I could also append printf "\n\n\n" but apparently it's annoying. I wonder if there is something simpler and works well. The tool in this article doesn't exactly match my need, as it prints a spacer immediately after output pauses, not after a command finishes.
- ninkendo 2y agomacOS’s built-in Terminal.app has a feature I love for this, which I haven’t seen anything else replicate, which is that pressing Cmd-Up just scrolls up to the last command prompt in your scroll buffer. Just press it as many times as you want to find the beginning of previous commands you typed. I’m not sure how it’s implemented… maybe they take note of what your prompt looks like and generate a regex for it? Or maybe they take note of when the last time it was that your shell process had no child processes and read from stdin… but it works quite reliably.
- asdff 2y agoSometimes its nice to use something like tmux for this. Open a new pane for such a run and all output will be in the scroll buffer of that one pane.
- Izkata 2y agoYou could temporarily change your prompt: export PS1="\n\n\n\n\n\n$PS1" Or if the repeated prompt is part of your visual pattern matching: export PS1="$PS1\n$PS1\n$PS1\n$PS1"
- ezekg 2y agoI wasn't aware of |& -- pretty sweet. I always redirected via 2>&1 and then piped.
- wruza 2y agoI often use this technique in my dev debug logs. If the last print() was more than a few seconds ago, it also prints “(2.4 seconds passed)” in gray text before printing another line. This helps with visually separating debug requests, button clicks, etc. Mine is not a tool, I just define my log function that tracks last call time. const now = Date.now() if (now - last_time >= 2000) { console.log(…) } last_time = now console.log(…args) Things like that should be in all dev toolboxes by default, I think. It’s amazing how we create animated experiences etc for users but when it comes to development it’s just println(). The cobbler’s children go barefoot.
- JoBrad 2y agoWouldn’t putting a \n at the start of PS1 do a similar thing?
- nasretdinov 2y agoNice tool, but I agree with other commenters that it needs to be implemented at the level of the terminal emulator (which makes it much harder to implement). The reasons for this are the following: 1. If a tool outputs escape sequences and expects the cursor to be at a certain position, this assumption will break 2. You have to not forget to pipe it, which might not always be possible to do cleanly 3. Since you're piping the output, many tools will stop using colours, etc, which is annoying. I've tried to make a similar tool, but as a patch to bash (to color stderr output), and it had many issues that can't be resolved on that level, e.g. many programs assume that stderr and stdout point to the same PTY, so they can print some ascii sequences to stdout and some to stderr, and expect them to be displayed in the correct order. (The article about it, in Russian: https://habr.com/ru/articles/207768/ https://habr.com/ru/articles/207768/)
- kevincox 2y agoI had the exact same problem and created a similar command with a slightly different strategy: https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog/-/blob/v1/README.md https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog/-/blob/v1/README.md