On 15 Mar 2010, at 20:46, David W Noon wrote:
...
Because emerge jobs produce copious amounts of output that is
difficult
to read as it scrolls past. I much prefer the cron daemon or at
daemon
to send me the output as email, so I can scroll backwards and
forwards through it at my leisure.
`man screen`
I don't have a man page for "screen".
This is obviously because it isn't installed.
I'm going to assume that you're not being facetious, however I'm
amazed you don't know `screen`. Everyone should know `screen`! It's
amazing, and I can't believe that if you had tried it then you
wouldn't have it installed. I sure you'll wonder how you lived without
it.
You should try it:
`emerge screen` (don't sync just yet)
Now type:
`screen sudo eix-sync`
Wait for syncing to start, then press ctrl-a (together) then the d key.
Close the terminal window you're working in, if you like. Open
another. Or ssh in from another box.
Type:
`screen -Rd`
You should see all the sync output scrolling past. So press ctrl-a
followed by the escape key. Use ctrl-u to scroll up and see what you
missed. ctrl-d scrolls down and hitting escape 2 or 3 times exits the
"scrollback mode".
I'm not saying that this is better than having syncs performed by cron
job and the output emailed to you. In fact, that's something I've been
meaning to get round to setting up here. If I had the output of
(sync'd) `emerge -upv world` emailed to me weekly then it might ensure
that my irregular habits don't cause me to overlook updates.
HOWEVER, this branch of the thread has followed from your surprise
that people might run emerge by hand, and your reasons for this (very
first quoted above). I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with
emerging or syncing by hand. You can easily scroll back and review any
output that you need to - in fact the obvious way to do this is using
a conventional GUI terminal emulator in a windowing environment.
Also: grep PORTAGE_ELOG_MAIL /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example
This ensures you see all the *important* output of portage, without
having to watch the whole darn compiler output, which is pretty
useless. You just get an email for every package upon which Portage
has a comment to make.
Other stuff you can do with `screen`:
ctrl-a c - create a new screen "window"
ctrl-a n - next screen "window"
ctrl-a p - previous
ctrl-a ? - help
ctrl-a " - list open screen windows, select one
ctrl-a A - name a screen window, see above (capital "A")
Stroller.
