Question

Bit of a strange request.
I’d like have a window where I can record a list of ad-hoc notes, with a timestamp for each note.
I’ve written the following which works:

$ while read line
> do
> echo $(date +%H:%M:%S) $line
> done | tee log
Hello
21:35:30 Hello
World
21:35:32 World

Is there a more elegant way of doing this?

Answer 1

If you care about preserving whitespace, quote your variable $line. The date format %T is equivalent to %H:%M:%S. You may want to append to the log file.

Otherwise, the only thing I can think of to make it more eleganter is to put in in a function.

notes() { 
  echo Type some notes. Hit Ctrl-D to quit.
  while read line; do 
    echo $(date +%T) "$line"
  done | tee -a log.txt
}