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I often execute shell commands via M-! and their output is then shown in the buffer *Shell Command Output*. How can I make this buffer display the end (rather than the beginning) so that I can see whether the shell command successfully terminated?
I saw here that when compiling via M-x compile, one can use (setq compilation-scroll-output t) to display the end of the compilation buffer. That behaviour would be great for *Shell Command Output*.
Emacs 26.1 provides the shell-command-dont-erase-buffer option, if you set it to end-last-out, M-! moves the point to the end of the output, however, it won't delete the previous commands' outputs, unlike the default behavior.
(setq shell-command-dont-erase-buffer 'end-last-out)
(let ((compilation-scroll-output t)) (compile "while :; do echo \"Hello-World\"; sleep 1; done"))M-x compilein this case?shell-commandto make it behave as you desire. There are several variations of how that function operates depending upon the circumstances ... Someone may be inclined to write-up a solution for you ... this question; however, is (in my opinion) an exact duplicate of the linked thread ... which has a solution that may not be what you are looking for.M-x compilein this case is also a bit more consistent in how I use it in other cases. Also, I often useM-!to create a new file (touch foo.txt) and there is no need to show the buffer in this case, for example (which would probably require a bit of work as you say). So, nice, thanks for pointing that out.