Once: Cache CLI Commands

28 points by baquero 3 hours ago | 8 comments

deadbunny 1 hour ago |

I've always wanted to deal with cache invalidation in my terminal.

aktau 1 hour ago |

These kinds of tools are very useful. I have my own called memo (which is just a shell script: https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/memo).

It was discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45670052 and others chimed in with their own (like bkt(1) and up(1)).

The main differences I see:

  - memo doesn't need to be built (its a shell script)
  - once keeps output cache in a running daemon. By contrast, memo stores content under /tmp with whatever the best compression available is (it prefers zstd). There's trade-offs in that. More pareto-optimal from the security front may be to have a sort of session key and to compress-then-encrypt files on disk.

xuhu 1 hour ago |

I wish this worked without prefixing the commands with "once". Especially if I ran a command with verbose output and afterwards decided I wanted to grep something from it. Terminals have the output in their scrollback buffer and maybe it's just a matter of writing an "output" command that lets me run:

    $ cmake ..
    $ output | grep "libssl version"

stingraycharles 1 hour ago |

Seems well-designed, but what’s the use case? I’m trying to think of them but my creativity is failing me.

adregan 1 hour ago | |

I have a small fish function that does something similar. It saves output to a file in XDG_CACHE_HOME. I wouldn’t use it for sensitive items like passwords or tokens in the examples, but I do use it for scripts that need to fetch some data from the network.

For example, I have a script for automating the creation of PRs which fetches the available labels for a repo from github and presents them with fzf multi select. I store the labels with a TTL of a week so that I don’t have to fetch them every time and the script compares the file’s age against the desired TTL to invalidate.

I find it useful for augmenting other programs, but I’m not typically using it on the cli directly.

frizlab 1 hour ago | |

From the example in the Readme, I guess retrieving a token from an API, using a secret fetched from a secure vault that requests a password or TouchID validation.

Not sure if there could be other interesting uses. I can’t think of one anyways.

whilenot-dev 1 hour ago | |

I have the same question, especially since any CLI output can be stored explicitly in some variable or temp file. What's the advantage of storing the output implicitly?

baquero 3 hours ago |

Do you have CLI calls that you want to cache? Here you go!

- memo doesn't need to be built (its a shell script) - once keeps output cache in a running daemon. By contrast, memo stores content under /tmp with whatever the best compression available is (it prefers zstd). There's trade-offs in that. More pareto-optimal from the security front may be to have a sort of session key and to compress-then-encrypt files on disk.