How do I jump to the first line of shell output? (shell equivalent of emacs comint-show-output)

Question

I recently discovered 'comint-show-output' in emacs shell mode, which jumps to the first line of shell output, which I find incredibly handy when looking at shell output that exceeds a screen length. The advantages of this command over scrolling with 'page up' are A) you don't have to scan with your eyes for the first line of the output B) you only have to hit the key combo once (instead of 'page up' a number of times which probably is not known beforehand).

I thought about ending all my commands with '| more' but actually this is not what I want since most of the time, I want to retain all output in the terminal buffer, and I usually want to see the end of the shell output first.

I use OSX. Is there a terminal app (on os x) and shell (on remote linux) combination equivalent (so I can do something similar without using emacs all the time - I know, crazy talk)? I normally use bash, but would be fine with switching shells just for this feature.

Answer 1

You could always do something in bash like this:

alias foo='!! | more'

which would make foo run the previous command with more. I'm not sure of any way to do exactly what you are suggesting.

Answer 2

If you're expecting a lot of output and don't want to run your command twice, you can use tee(1) to fork the output:

my-command | tee /tmp/my-command.log | less

This will pipe the output to a paginator (less), while simultaneously logging the output to a file (in this case, a file named /tmp/my-command.log). If you need to review the output after you've quit from less, you can just cat the log file instead of re-running the command.

Answer 3

The way I do this sort of thing is by sending my output to a file and then watching the file as it is written. You still get the results of the command dumped to terminal history in real time and can still inspect the output's actual contents further after the fact (or in another terminal, etc...)

command > output &
tail -f output

head output