On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 08:26:11AM +0100, robin wrote:
> I usually pipe into less whenever something overflows the terminal
> height, but having to type 2>&1 to see stderr is a bit cumbersome. In
> dvtm Shift-PageUp is much easier.
I use a generic wrapper function in Bash:
# $1 Name or path of the command to execute.
# $2 White-space separated list of options to pass to the command
# when stdout is a TTY. If there are no TTY-dependent options
# this should be "--".
# $@ Arguments to pass to command.
#
function -paginate()
{
local errfd=1
local command="$1"
local tty_specific_args="$2"
shift 2
if [[ -t 1 ]]; then
test "$tty_specific_args" != "--" || tty_specific_args=""
test -t 2 || errfd=2
"$command" $tty_specific_args "$@" 2>&"$errfd" | less -X -F -R
return "${PIPESTATUS[0]/141/0}" # Ignore SIGPIPE failures.
fi
"$command" "$@"
}
Then I have around 30 aliases for various commands I use like this:
alias cat='-paginate cat --'
alias grep='-paginate grep --color=always'
alias ps='-paginate ps --cols=$COLUMNS --sort=uid,pid -N --ppid 2 -p 2'
Output is only paginated when stdout is a TTY so I can still use pipes,
and the less flags ensure that less will exit if the output fits on one
screen. I also use tmux, but I find less to be less painful to use than
copy mode in tmux when I don't need to actually copy text.
Eric
