Limit output of all Linux commands

Question

I'm looking for a way to limit the amount of output produced by all command line programs in Linux, and preferably tell me when it is limited.

I'm working over a server which has a lag on the display. Occasionally I will accidentally run a command which outputs a large amount of text to the terminal, such as cat on a large file or ls on a directory with many files. I then have to wait a while for all the output to be printed to the terminal.

So is there a way to automatically pipe all output into a command like head or wc to prevent too much output having to be printed to terminal?

Answer 1

I don't know about the general case, but for each well-known command (cat, ls, find?) you could do the following:

• hardlink a copy to the existing utility
• write a tiny bash function that calls the utility and pipes to head (or wc, or whatever)
• alias the name of the utility to call your function.

So along these lines (utterly untested):

$ ln `which cat` ~/bin/old_cat

function trunc_cat () {
   `old_cat $@ | head -n 100`
}

alias cat=trunc_cat

Answer 2

Making aliases of all your commands would be a good start. Something like

alias lm="ls -al | more"
alias cam="cat $@ | more"