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 s

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