ptee 0.2.0

"Progress tee", an enhanced "tee" program with in-place overwriting of "status".

ptee (for “Progress Tee”) is a console utility that builds upon the basic functionality provided by the standard Unix tee command. It accepts lines of text from a running command (such as an invocation of make) and displays them to the terminal such that important lines of text (such as compiler errors) are kept while lines of “status” information are overwritten in-place on one line.

For example, suppose an invocation of make generates the following output:

$ make
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file1.o file1.c
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file2.o file2.c
file2.c:1:12: warning: ‘x’ defined but not used [-Wunused-variable]
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file3.o file3.c
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file4.o file4.c
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file5.o file5.c

The compiler invocation lines (gcc -c ...) become uninteresting as soon as the next line shows up, unless there are warnings or errors associated with that invocation. With ptee, you can supply a regular expression to match these types of “status” lines to allow them to overwrite each other on the terminal. Lines not matching the regular expression will be displayed on a line of their own (along with any previous line of status for context). In the above example, the output would ultimately look like this:

$ make | ptee --regex gcc
gcc -c -Wall -W -o file2.o file2.c
file2.c:1:12: warning: ‘x’ defined but not used [-Wunused-variable]

During the run of make, each line of status will be written on top of the previous line of status, providing continuous feedback while keeping the interesting lines from scrolling too far off the screen.

See ptee --help for more information.