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I'm running commands which I want to specifically group them by every command, as shown in the example below. Tried printing with echo -e '| $line' but it only affects commands that output the text contained in the file.

Background

Originally I saw a video which showed terminal commands that were somewhat grouped using the '|' just like the sample below. Im trying to customize or make a function for my .bashrc/.bash_profile files so that all of the outputs will have a '|' character at the beginning of each line of the output.

Discussion is also found here. So likely I'll make a function for the STDERR and STDOUT (just like mentioned here).

Example

+>system:~/sample
| No command 'sample' found, did you mean:
|  Command 'yample' from package 'yample' (universe)
|  Command 'ample' from package 'ample' (universe)
| sample: command not found
+>system:~/sudo apt-get update 
| [sudo] password for system: 
| Ign http://dl.google.com stable InRelease
| Hit http://dl.google.com stable Release.gpg                                    
| Ign http://security.ubuntu.com trusty-security InRelease                       
| yadda yadda ...
+>system:~/
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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

You can try piping through a sed command that replaces the beginning of line (^) with whatever prefix you want (|), e.g.:

some_command | sed 's/^/| /'

This will work for simpler commands, but will fail as more complex applications position the cursor in some nontrivial ways, and will also delay the output of several commands (since they switch from line buffering to using a much bigger buffer, seeing their standard output is not a terminal).

I'd generally recommend to ditch this approach, and instead configure a shell prompt that stands out (uses bold, italic, color, background color, special Unicode characters, whatever occurs to you).

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0

One could do something like this

LC_ALL=C cm='update-alternatives --display java'; i=0 ; \
while read -r line ; \
do let i++; printf "%s | %3d | %s\n" "$cm" "$i"  "${line}" ; \
done < <($cm)

This gives some output like:

update-alternatives --display java |   1 | java - auto mode
update-alternatives --display java |   2 | link best version is /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java
update-alternatives --display java |   3 | link currently points to /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java
update-alternatives --display java |   4 | link java is /usr/bin/java
update-alternatives --display java |   5 | slave java.1.gz is /usr/share/man/man1/java.1.gz
update-alternatives --display java |   6 | /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java - priority 1111
update-alternatives --display java |   7 | slave java.1.gz: /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/man/man1/java.1.gz

I have no solution to add this to all commands run in bash. One could wrap things into a bash function like this:

#!/bin/bash

function ao() {
  export LC_ALL=C
  cm="$*";
  i=0;
  while read -r line ; 
  do
    ((i++));
    printf "%s | %3d | %s\n" "$cm" "$i"  "${line}";
  done < <($cm )
}

Save this to a file, let's name it addoutput. Then source this file:

. addoutput

You can then use the function on all your commands by using

ao yourcommand

Note, as also mentioned by @egmont, depending on the command your output might not be what you wanted. Also output sent to /dev/stderr is not prefixed with code here.

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