I got tired of my screen getting flooded with text when all I wanted was to see the last output line at any given time. What I really want is to just see one output line and have it replaced with some newer text when it’s available. So I wrote a script (in, ahem, bash) that lets your do exactly this. Call it “tailor.sh” or whatever you want:

(If the code below is screwed up, see it here on gist)

#!/bin/bash -eu
LOG_FILE=$1
SB="stdbuf -i0 -oL"
shift
tput sc
$@ 2>&1 \
   | $SB tee $LOG_FILE \
   | $SB cut -c-$(tput cols) \
   | $SB sed -u 's/\(.\)/\\\1/g' \
   | $SB xargs -0 -d'\n' -iyosi  -n1  bash -c 'tput rc;tput el; printf "\r%s" yosi'
EXIT_CODE=${PIPESTATUS[0]}
tput rc;tput el;printf "\r" # Delete the last printed line
exit $EXIT_CODE

I use it in a test env bringup script to run some builds. Instead of having to lose all the context of the wrapping script, I now see just a single output line of the invoked builds at any given time.