bash - automatically capture output of last execut

Question

I'd like to be able to use the result of the last executed command in a subsequent command. For example,

$ find . -name foo.txt
./home/user/some/directory/foo.txt

Now let's say I want to be able to open the file in an editor, or delete it, or do something else with it, e.g.

mv <some-variable-that-contains-the-result> /some/new/location

How can I do it? Maybe using some bash variable?

Update:

To clarify, I don't want to assign things manually. What I'm after is something like built-in bash variables, e.g.

ls /tmp
cd $_

$_ holds the last argument of the previous command. I want something similar, but with the output of the last command.

Final update:

Seth's answer has worked quite well. Couple of things to bear in mind:

• don't forget to touch /tmp/x when trying the solution for the very first time
• the result will only be stored if last command's exit code was successful

Answer 1

I usually do what the others here have suggested ... without the assignment:

$find . -iname '*.cpp' -print
./foo.cpp
./bar.cpp
$vi `!!`
2 files to edit

You can get fancier if you like:

$grep -R "some variable" * | grep -v tags
./foo/bar/xxx
./bar/foo/yyy
$vi `!!`

Answer 2

I had a similar need, in which I wanted to use the output of last command into the next one. Much like a | (pipe). eg

$ which gradle 
/usr/bin/gradle
$ ls -alrt /usr/bin/gradle

to something like -

$ which gradle |: ls -altr {}

Solution : Created this custom pipe. Really simple, using xargs -

$ alias :='xargs -I{}'

Basically nothing by creating a short hand for xargs, it works like charm, and is really handy. I just add the alias in .bash_profile file.

Answer 3

I think you might be able to hack out a solution that involves setting your shell to a script containing:

#!/bin/sh
bash | tee /var/log/bash.out.log

Then if you set $PROMPT_COMMAND to output a delimiter, you can write a helper function (maybe called _) that gets you the last chunk of that log, so you can use it like:

% find lots*of*files
...
% echo "$(_)"
... # same output, but doesn't run the command again

Answer 4

you can use !!:1. Example:

~]$ ls *.~
class1.cpp~ class1.h~ main.cpp~ CMakeList.txt~ 

~]$ rm !!:1
rm class1.cpp~ class1.h~ main.cpp~ CMakeList.txt~ 


~]$ ls file_to_remove1 file_to_remove2
file_to_remove1 file_to_remove2

~]$ rm !!:1
rm file_to_remove1

~]$ rm !!:2
rm file_to_remove2

Answer 5

The shell doesn't have perl-like special symbols that store the echo result of the last command.

Learn to use the pipe symbol with awk.

find . | awk '{ print "FILE:" $0 }'

In the example above you could do:

find . -name "foo.txt" | awk '{ print "mv "$0" ~/bar/" | "sh" }'

Answer 6

It's quite easy. Use back-quotes:

var=`find . -name foo.txt`

And then you can use that any time in the future

echo $var
mv $var /somewhere