Occasionally I have a thought that I want to write into a file while I am at the terminal. I would want these notes all in the same file, just listed one after the other. I would also like a date / time tag on each one.
Is it possible to do this without having to open the file each time? Can I just enter it into the terminal and have it appended to the file each time with a command or script?
I am using GNU BASH.
Also, to write multiple lines to a file from the command line, do:
cat >> sometextfile.txt << EOF
text
more text
and another line
EOF
Write yourself a shell script called "n". Put this in it:
#!/bin/sh
notefile=/home/me/notefile
date >> $notefile
emacs $notefile -f end-of-buffer
I recommend this instead of cat >> notefile because:
If you insist on avoiding a text editor, use a shell function:
n () { date >> /home/me/notefile; cat >> /home/me/notefile; }
which should work in all shells claiming Bourne shell compatibility.
n function write to the file? Don't you mean something like a echo "$*" rather than UUOC? How does it incorporate the date/time tag?
– jasonwryan
Jan 27 '12 at 03:54
.emacs.d. Yikes, I need to clean that up.
– quodlibetor
Jan 30 '12 at 19:35
Just use echo:
echo $(date) Hi. >> notes.txt
You can use >> to append to a file, or use > to overwrite it.
Lots of neat bells and whistles here!
KISS method:
date >>filename; cat >>filename
If you have ruby installed on your computer you can use https://github.com/minhajuddin/taskr . This way you get a nice view of your notes with tags and the hours elapsed.
$(..) over the backticks for command substitution. More info: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11576/why-the-double-quotes-and-backquotes-in-a-shell-script
– rahmu
Jan 27 '12 at 10:24
Depending on your needs, syslogd might be another tool to peruse. The command
theuser@tetrad:~$ logger This message is sent to syslog
will log the message with the facility user.notice. With many Linux systems this will be enough to have a file /var/log/user.log opened and appended to, with others you may need to define a handling for that facility and log level (or, whichever facility you choose - the local0 to local7 facilities are usually free to assign to things like this.
It's got the benefit of being able (aka configurable) to send notes from client machines to a central logging server, something I like to use for keeping track of administrative action since it preserves timestamp, user and host information automagically, while keeping actions in order.
resulting output in local file:
theuser@tetrad:~$ tail /var/log/user.log
Jan 31 07:18:37 tetrad theuser: This message is sent to syslog
Example for syslog configuration line on Solaris:
local5.notice ifdef(`LOGHOST', /var/log/diary, @loghost)
Note: The ifdef is preprocessed with m4, on the machine with the hostname/hostalias "loghost", the messages will be logged to the file /var/log/diary, on all others, they will be sent to the remote syslog service at loghost. To test this kind of configuration, the config file can be sent through m4 for expansion (leave away the -D LOGHOST to see how it would look on a system not called loghost:
theuser@solstice$ /usr/ccs/bin/m4 -D LOGHOST /etc/syslog.conf
Taskwarrior may do what you wanted a little better than a simple shell script. The 30-second Tutorial should tell you if I am right or wrong.
Combining a few different answers to achieve what I sought out, which was multiple options.
user@hostname:~/Documents$ echo text >> filename user@hostname:~/Documents$ cat filename text
user@hostname:~/Documents$ cat >> filename2 << EOF > text line 1 > text line 2 > text line 3 > EOF user@hostname:~/Documents$ cat filename2 text line 1 text line 2 text line 3
Modify a file at a given line number
user@hostname:~/Documents$ sed -i '2iinserting new line' filename2 user@hostname:~/Documents$ cat filename2 text line 1 inserting new line text line 2 text line 3
cat > sometextfile.txt << EOFto overwrite the existing file. – mbomb007 Jul 18 '19 at 18:52