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Once: Cache CLI Commands

17 points baquero 2 hours ago 8 comments

baquero 2 hours ago | parent

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

stingraycharles 55 minutes ago | parent

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

frizlab 52 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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?

adregan 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

deadbunny 46 minutes ago | parent

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

xuhu 44 minutes ago | parent

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"

aktau 39 minutes ago | parent

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.