d command 5.4

The d command runs a command in the background and redirects its output to a file. The output file is annotated with start and end time, the actual command used, cwd, host, etc.
You can ask the d command to extract the last command from the output file and run it again, you can ask it to append to the file or not, and other goodies.
It comes with handy little programs to look at the output, tail it, etc. d command is sort of trivial, but has been streamlined over many years.
Usage: d [ -f file ] c[n][a][p] cmd arg ...
or: d [ -f file ] m[n][a][p] [ make_arg ... ]
or: d [ -f file ] s[n][a][p] [ additional_arg ... ]
or: d [ -f file ] h
Do a task in the background, with its stdout and stderr redirected to a file called out or to file or to a file named by a $yostD_OUTFILE environment variable. The d command usually does
mv ,out out
and then creates a new out file, but d can be told to append to out instead.
The task argument is composed of individual letters:
One of these is required:
c Do the following command - redirection and piping work if quoted.
m Do a make.
s Do the same command again (extract the last command from out, and run it again (without nice unless you ask for it again).
h Print a history of what happened in this out file.
These are optional:
n Do it nicely.
a Append to out.
p Just print the command that would be executed; dont run it.
The d command comes along with several helper shell functions:
q tail -f out
qq cat out
qt tail -20 out
cq clear ; q
cqq clear ; qq
wq wait "$@" ; printf "b" ; qq
wqt wait "$@" ; printf "b" ; qt
The output from d into the file out consists of
prologue
output from the command
epilogue
as shown in the example below, which does this:
Run a command (c) in the background, with output to the out file.
Run the same (s) comand again, with nice (n), appending (a) the output to the existing out file.
Show the out file.
Show what will happen (p) if we try to run the same command again, using ‘d s’.
Show the history (h) of commands and results contained in the out file.
Enhancements:
- The script was fixed so that in addition to zsh, it also works with bash, ksh, and sh.