Question

In Mathematica, it is possible to reuse the output of the previous command by using %.

Is something similar possible for bash (or some other shell)?

For example, I run a make which gives warnings, but I want to find all warnings.
So, I type

make | grep "warning"

but I’m not able to see the output of the make then.

I would like to type something like this instead:

make
% | grep "warning"

Answer 1

Since the amount of output is indeterminate, it doesn’t make sense for bash to store it for you for re-display. But there’s an alternate solution to your problem:

The tee command allows you to duplicate an output stream to a file. So if you’re willing to use a file for temporary storage, you can do something like this:

make | tee output.txt
grep "warning" output.txt

This solution avoids running make twice, which could be (a) expensive and (b) inconsistent: the second make may be doing less work than the first because some targets were already made the first time around.

Note: I haven’t tried this. You may need to fiddle with joining the error and output streams, or such.