this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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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
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I usually solve this kind of problem by piping to less or a logfile and then just searching in there. You can get it to refresh new content by pressing the End key twice. Or maybe less just needs the -f flag or something similar. I'm too lazy to look it up.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

less can enter a grep-like mode by hitting ~~/~~

Edit: it's & for the grep mode, / is search.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

More info: / only searches from cursor to end of file. ? searches from cursor to start of file.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Oops yeah I just edited my comment, put the wrong symbol!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

That's not at all grep-like. Grep is a line filter, not a character sequence highlighter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Oops sorry it's &! / is find