Can i cache the output of a command on Linux from CLI?

Question

I'm looking for an implementation of a 'cacheme' command, which 'memoizes' the output of whatever has in ARGV. If it never ran it, it will run it and somewhat memorize the output. If it ran it, it will just copy the output of the file (or even better, both output and error to &1 and &2 respectively).

Let's suppose someone wrote this command, it would work like this.

$ time cacheme sleep 1    # first time it takes one sec
real   0m1.228s
user   0m0.140s
sys    0m0.040s

$ time cacheme sleep 1    # second time it looks for stdout in the cache (dflt expires in 1h)
#DEBUG# Cache version found! (1 minute old)

real   0m0.100s
user   0m0.100s
sys    0m0.040s

This example is a bit silly because it has no output. Ideally it would be tested on a script like sleep-1-and-echo-hello-world.sh.

I created a small script that creates a file in /tmp/ with hash of full command name and username, but I'm pretty sure something already exists.

Are you aware of any of this?

Answer 1

Author of bash-cache here with an update. I recently published bkt, a CLI and Rust library for subprocess caching. Here's a simple example:

# Execute and cache an invocation of 'date +%s.%N'
$ bkt -- date +%s.%N
1631992417.080884000

# A subsequent invocation reuses the same cached output
$ bkt -- date +%s.%N
1631992417.080884000

It supports a number of features such as asynchronous refreshing (--stale and --warm), namespaced caches (--scope), and optionally keying off the working directory (--cwd) and select environment variables (--env). See the README for more.

It's still a work in progress but it's functional and effective! I'm using it already to speed up my shell prompt and a number of other common tasks.