WIP pipe support

[willmcgugan]

No description provided.

[youtux]

I see some issues with this impl (all verified):

• piping to tl results in the creation of a file that keeps on growing on disk. This can be a big issue when piping a lot of data, or when leaving the program to run for a long time
• the temporary file is not deleted if the process is killed
• the subprocess is not terminated when the parent is killed

[youtux]

is there a way to implement piping without spawning a new process, since that seems to be the cause of all issues after all?
I guess the hard part is to try to tell textual.app.App to read from /dev/tty instead of /dev/stdin, right?

[willmcgugan]

If you want to be able to view / search the data that is being piped, it needs to be stored somewhere. Memory is going to run out before disk, so a temp file is the only place for it to go.

By kiling the process, do you literally mean with the kill command? Why use that and not ctrl+C ?

[youtux]

If you want to be able to view / search the data that is being piped, it needs to be stored somewhere. Memory is going to run out before disk, so a temp file is the only place for it to go.

True, but what you could do is to keep in memory or on disk only a certain amount of data. That's actually what terminal apps do (and you can usually configure the amount of "scrollback", aka the buffer size).

By kiling the process, do you literally mean with the kill command? Why use that and not ctrl+C ?

Of course Ctrl+C is the preferred way, but processed can be killed for other reasons, for example if they use too much memory and the OS kills them. (but there can be many more examples than this).
It's just something to be aware of in general when spawning processes

[youtux]

I would expect most of the users to prefer having a limited "scrollback" capability rather than having the program causing the system to run out of disk space