this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
56 points (98.3% liked)

Linux

48624 readers
1658 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I want to run a command and see all of its output on the left hand side, while simultaneously searching/grepping for particular lines on the right hand side. In other words, I want a temporary vertically split screen in my CLI, ideally with scrollback on each side of the split, but where I expect the left hand side to be scrolling thousands of lines quickly, while on the right hand side is a slow accumulation of "matches" to my grep.

Is this possible today? What tools would you recommend to accomplish this?

EDIT: To be clear, a one-liner is preferable over learning tmux or screen, although this does motivate me to perhaps begin learning tmux.

In case this is an X/Y problem: The specific command I'm trying to run is an rsync simulation (dry-run) where I want to both check that the command works, and subsequently check that there are no denied errors. The recommended way to do this is to run the command twice, as follows (but I want to combine it into one pass):

# first specify the "-n" parameter so rsync will simulate its operation. You should use this before you start:
rsync -naP --exclude-from=rsync-homedir-local.txt /home/$USER/ $BACKUPDIR/

# check for permission denied errors in your homedir:
rsync -naP --exclude-from=rsync-homedir-local.txt /home/$USER/ $BACKUPDIR/ | grep denied
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] notabot@lemm.ee 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tmux is a very helpful terminal multiplexer, meaning it can split your terminal into multiple panes. So, create two side by side panes, then one way of doing it is:

  • on the left, run your cmd | tee >(grep 'denied' > error.log)
  • on the right, run tail -f error.log

The tee process takes it's standard in, and writes itbto both standard out, so you see all the lines, and the path it's been given. The >(...) operator runs the grep in a subprocess, and returns the path to it's standard input pipe, so grep receives every line, and writes the denied lines to a log file which you display with tail in the other pane.

Rather than using a file for error.log you could also use a named pipe in much the same way.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks! I'm curious if there is a way to do this as a one-liner?

[–] notabot@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry for th slow answer, I've been away. There is a way, if it's still useful to you:

First, create a named fifo, you only need to do this once:

mkfifo logview

Run your rsync in one pane, with a filtered view in the second:

tmux new 'rsync ...options... |& tee logview' \; split-window -h 'grep "denied" logview'

Replace ...options... with your normal rsync command line.

That should give you a split view, with all the normal messages on the left, and only messages containing 'denied' on the right.

The |& makes sure we capture both stdout and stderr, tee then writes them to the fifo and displays them. split-window tells tmux to create a second pane, and display the output of grep.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago