Question

Im using a cool program in terminal but it’s pre-compiled… Luckily all I need is the output of this system, but the way I need it is tricky… I need it to run normally but output the last line of text in the window to a text file. I jabs been looking around but people only make it so that I can log the whole thing, not just the last line.

it is a compiled unix executable that can’t be run with something like that because it needs to keep running and won’t stop until stopped, and that didn’t work

Answer 1

You can use the tail command to only capture the last n lines of a file or a stream. For example, to run ./myProgram but only display the last line of output:

./myProgram | tail -n 1

This pipes (|) the output of your program into the input of tail, which discards everything except the last n lines.

To save that output to a file instead, you can redirect (>) tail‘s output to a file:

./myProgram | tail -n 1 > out.txt