> I am running a program, decide to 'ctrl+z, bg' it, but it keeps spewing onto my terminal. Instead, just store it so I can look at later
This exists. It's called "less".
It's not the program which keeps spewing at your terminal. At the point where you Ctrl+z the program has already written the content that keeps being spewn. It's just that the terminal is too slow to display the data in the buffer.
> I want to say "take the output of the previous program and put it into a file", without either running it again, or cutting + pasting it into a file.
I want to do that sometimes, too. And then I just re-run it.
It's not a problem of the implementation, I just didn't run it right the first time.
Shells could be implemented to remember the output of your last command-line. There are some questions though: Where should the output be stored (memory / disk usage), what about very big or infinite streams, what about interactive applications... "less" is such a program it makes a particular set of decisions wrt to these questions.
This exists. It's called "less".
It's not the program which keeps spewing at your terminal. At the point where you Ctrl+z the program has already written the content that keeps being spewn. It's just that the terminal is too slow to display the data in the buffer.
> I want to say "take the output of the previous program and put it into a file", without either running it again, or cutting + pasting it into a file.
I want to do that sometimes, too. And then I just re-run it.
It's not a problem of the implementation, I just didn't run it right the first time.
Shells could be implemented to remember the output of your last command-line. There are some questions though: Where should the output be stored (memory / disk usage), what about very big or infinite streams, what about interactive applications... "less" is such a program it makes a particular set of decisions wrt to these questions.