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

This is a really hacky solution, but it seems to mostly work some of the time. During testing, I noted it sometimes didn’t work very well when getting a ^C on the command line, though I did tweak it a bit to behave a bit better.

This hack is an interactive mode hack only, and I am pretty confident that I would not recommend it to anyone. Background commands are likely to cause even less defined behavior than normal. The other answers are a better way of programmatically getting at results.

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That being said, here is the “solution”:

PROMPT_COMMAND='LAST="`cat /tmp/x`"; exec >/dev/tty; exec > >(tee /tmp/x)'

Set this bash environmental variable and issues commands as desired. $LAST will usually have the output you are looking for:

startide seth> fortune
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
                -- William Congreve
startide seth> echo "$LAST"
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
                -- William Congreve