Re: Tip of the day: previous command output

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Jesper Holmberg wrote:

> The motivation for the following snippet is the fact that I often do a 
> 'find' or a 'locate' to find some files I'm interested in, and then want 
> to do some action on one of the files I just found.
[...]
> What this does is that it repeats the previous command, saving the output
> in a string.

I use this little function [*] for a similar purpose:

    keep () {
        kept=()		# Erase old value in case of error on next line
        kept=($~*)
        print -Rc - $kept
    }
    alias keep='noglob keep '

Note that "kept" is deliberately not declared local.

E.g. I might do

     patch < zsh-workers_NNNN.diff
     keep **/*.(orig|rej)
     emacs ${${kept:#*.orig}:r}
     rm $kept

That way I don't have to redo the possibly-expensive recursive glob twice;
the result is all stashed in $kept where I can manipulate the file names
and pick out the ones I want to work on.

I haven't bothered to combine it with a completion key because I hardly
ever want one specific file or its unmodified name; I almost always end up
typing some kind of parameter substitution expression.


[*] OK, I'm fibbing.  I actually call it "show" but there's an MH command
by that name that zsh may try to do completion for, so I changed the name
for public consumption.