You'll really need to show us the 'plod' code before we can help figure out what is going on here.

I just had a thought. Is there any reason why you need to use plod in the first place? Unix already allows you to be lazy if you don't want to do a lot of typing on the command line. Why not create an shell alias? For example I often use the command ls -lt | more. That's far too much typing for me so I've got an alias. Here's a snip from my .bash_profile:

alias l='ls -lt | more'
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You could also create an alias for the commands you are attempting:

alias foo='somecommand -pdjoh >> /path-to/your-output-file'
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Just a thought...

-- vek --