Unix output management tools

st

(No idea why I picked that name)

A tool for storing the output of any program and select lines to be used as input or argument to another programs.

e.g. Suppose the log folder looks like this:

> ls
2020-01-01.log
2020-01-03.log
2020-01-04.log
2020-01-05.log
2020-01-07.log
2020-01-10.log
2020-01-11.log

and you want to combine logs 01-03 to 01-10 into one file.

With st, you can do the following:

> ls | st --
1 2020-01-01.log
2 2020-01-03.log
3 2020-01-04.log
4 2020-01-05.log
5 2020-01-07.log
6 2020-01-10.log
7 2020-01-11.log
> st 2 - 6 -o cat > out.log

st bucket (cache) is saved in the file system, which means different terminal sessions can access it at the same time. e.g. you can run stls in one terminal and st 1 vim in another. You can manually choose a different bucket by using -b option or set stbucket in the environment.

Use st -h to see the full documentation for more functionalities, more examples included.

Note: please do not use temp as the bucket name as some scripts below also use this bucket as temp storage

stls

Because ls | st -- is so frequently used, I decided to write a wrapper for it.

If additional arguments are provided: if the argument starts with - then it will be used as an argument for ls, otherwise it will be used as a filtering regex (case ignored).

e.g. stls -aS '\.c' is the same as ls -aS | grep -i '\.c' | st --

stfind

Similar to stls, just a wrapper for find for searching files in subdirectories.

stgrep

Similar to stls, just a wrapper for grep. The cache lines are files names. Use -C as the first arg to turn on case sensitive stgrep [-C] PATTERNS [FILE...]

stv

A wrapper for vim -p [FILE...]

stcd

A warpper for changing directory with ease.

Suppose you are at /etc/defaults that contains folder randomFolder

> stls          # list all folders
1 randomFolder
> . stcd 1      # cd into randomFolder
> . stcd        # cd into /etc/defaults where st -- was called last

If the file you selected is not a directory, stcd will cd into the parent directory

> stfind common
1 ./src/python/common.py
> . stcd 1      # cd into ./src/python

It is recommanded to add the following line in your .profile or .bashrc or .zshrc ...

alias stcd='. stcd'

So that you can use stcd without adding the dot at the front

gst

A wrapper for git status -s to use st for caching the files

To colorize the output, set color.status to always in git config

stps

A wrapper for ps that label the lines and cache the PIDs where the location of PID in each line is extracted from the header line of ps

If additional arguments are provided:

• If the argument starts with - then it will be used as an argument for ps with the first - removed
  • e.g. stps -aux --r calls ps aux -r
  • You can also do stps -"aux -r" which also calls ps aux -r
  • If no combined option for ps (e.g. aux) is specified, default to ax
  • If you want to call ps with no argument, just pass -
• If the argument is a digit, it will be used as the line limit
• Otherwise the argument will be used as a keyword for filtering results

Putting all together, stps -"aux -r" zsh 5 will list top 5 zsh programs that use the most cpu among all users