How do I get the output of a vim 8.0 job?

Question

I wanted to try vim 8.0's new job start feature with a simple "hello world" style example. I tried:

:let job = job_start('ls -alh')

but there is no output. I tried

echo job_info(job)

and that output:

{'status': 'dead', 'stoponexit': 'term', 'exitval': 0, 'exit_cb': 0, 'channel': channel 2 closed, 'process': 32415}

not not the output of the job. how can I get this?

Answer 1

Vim jobs start with a channel, you can use job-options to redirect output to a buffer. For example:

:let job = job_start('ls -alh', {'out_io': 'buffer', 'out_name': 'mybuffer'})

then

:sbuf mybuffer

to read it.

Ref: :h job-start.

Escaping issues (dependent on the platform) can be fixed with a list (issue 1539):

let args = ['/bin/bash', '-c', cmd]