Shell – Get text output from shell script commands on screen while execution

echoscriptingshell

Consider the following shell script

val=($ls)

The ls does not not give any shell text output. Now, how do we get output text on screen while the command is being executed?

I can print the value of val to get the output, but using echo is not the point. So, using the following line is not the case

echo $val

So, in nutshell, how do I get the output of current command being executed in shell simultaneous as if you were executed the command by itself?

Best Answer

You can get the shell to echo everything it is doing, by running the following command:

sh -x yourscript

Or you can add this as the first command in the script:

set -x

It can get a bit too verbose, though. It's OK for debugging, but if you want selective output it would be best to do it yourself with carefully places echo commands.

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This works:

command | tee -a "$log_file"

tee saves input to a file (use -a to append rather than overwrite), and copies the input to standard output as well.

Because the command can detect that it's now being run in a non-interactive fashion this may change its behaviour. The most common side effect is that it disables colour output. If this happens (and you want ANSI colour coded output) you have to check the command documentation to see if it has a way to force it to revert to the interactive behaviour, such as grep --color=always. Beware that this means the log file will also include these escape codes, and you'll need to use less --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS "$log_file" to read it without distracting escape code literals. Also beware that there is no way to make the log file contents different from what is printed to screen when running the above command, so you can't have colour coded output to screen and non-coloured output in the log file.

Bash – create XML file using bash script

Print the line on this way:

echo '<root><foo a="b">'"$lorem"'</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' >> "$MY_XML"

This is need because single quotes deny shell interpreter from replace environment variables inside

Best Answer

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