Can i cache the output of a command on Linux from CLI?

Improved solution above somewhat by also adding expiry age as optional argument.

#!/bin/sh
# save as e.g. $HOME/.local/bin/cacheme
# and then chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/cacheme
VERBOSE=false
PROG="$(basename $0)"
DIR="${HOME}/.cache/${PROG}"
mkdir -p "${DIR}"
EXPIRY=600 # default to 10 minutes
# check if first argument is a number, if so use it as expiration (seconds)
[ "$1" -eq "$1" ] 2>/dev/null && EXPIRY=$1 && shift
[ "$VERBOSE" = true ] && echo "Using expiration $EXPIRY seconds"
CMD="$@"
HASH=$(echo "$CMD" | md5sum | awk '{print $1}')
CACHE="$DIR/$HASH"
test -f "${CACHE}" && [ $(expr $(date +%s) - $(date -r "$CACHE" +%s)) -le $EXPIRY ] || eval "$CMD" > "${CACHE}"
cat "${CACHE}"

Author of bash-cache here with an update. I recently published bkt, a CLI and Rust library for subprocess caching. Here's a simple example:

# Execute and cache an invocation of 'date +%s.%N'
$ bkt -- date +%s.%N
1631992417.080884000

# A subsequent invocation reuses the same cached output
$ bkt -- date +%s.%N
1631992417.080884000

It supports a number of features such as asynchronous refreshing (--stale and --warm), namespaced caches (--scope), and optionally keying off the working directory (--cwd) and select environment variables (--env). See the README for more.

It's still a work in progress but it's functional and effective! I'm using it already to speed up my shell prompt and a number of other common tasks.

I've implemented a simple caching script for bash, because I wanted to speed up plotting from piped shell command in gnuplot. It can be used to cache output of any command. Cache is used as long as the arguments are the same and files passed in arguments haven't changed. System is responsible for cleaning up.

#!/bin/bash

# hash all arguments
KEY="$@"

# hash last modified dates of any files
for arg in "$@"
do
  if [ -f $arg ]
  then
    KEY+=`date -r "$arg" +\ %s`
  fi
done

# use the hash as a name for temporary file
FILE="/tmp/command_cache.`echo -n "$KEY" | md5sum | cut -c -10`"

# use cached file or execute the command and cache it
if [ -f $FILE ]
then
  cat $FILE
else
  $@ | tee $FILE
fi

You can name the script cache, set executable flag and put it in your PATH. Then simply prefix any command with cache to use it.