ANNOTATE-OUTPUT(1) - phpMan

ANNOTATE-OUTPUT(1) General Commands Manual ANNOTATE-OUTPUT(1)

NAME
annotate-output - annotate program output with time and stream

SYNOPSIS
annotate-output [options] program [args ...]

DESCRIPTION
annotate-output will execute the specified program, while prepending every line with the
current time and O for stdout and E for stderr.

OPTIONS
+FORMAT
Controls the timestamp format, as per date(1). Defaults to "%H:%M:%S".

-h, --help
Display a help message and exit successfully.

EXAMPLE
$ annotate-output make
21:41:21 I: Started make
21:41:21 O: gcc -Wall program.c
21:43:18 E: program.c: Couldn't compile, and took me ages to find out
21:43:19 E: collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
21:43:19 E: make: *** [all] Error 1
21:43:19 I: Finished with exitcode 2

BUGS
Since stdout and stderr are processed in parallel, it can happen that some lines received
on stdout will show up before later-printed stderr lines (and vice-versa).

This is unfortunately very hard to fix with the current annotation strategy. A fix would
involve switching to PTRACE'ing the process. Giving nice a (much) higher priority over
the executed program could however cause this behaviour to show up less frequently.

The program does not work as well when the output is not linewise. In particular, when an
interactive program asks for input, the question might not be shown until after you have
answered it. This will give the impression that the annotated program has hung, while it
has not.