No I said this Way! IO Redirection

One of the most powerful tools in the Linux or Unix Scripting is that you are able to redirect StdIn StdOut and StdErr or even other Channels of IO Inter Process Communication
from and to Other Descriptors.

There are basicly 3 of them as i described above:
0 or the StdIn is the Standard Input descriptor.
1 or the StdOut is the standard output descriptor.
2 or the StdErr is the standard error descriptor.


You may use other descriptors like 3 or higher up to 255 for programming or scripting purposes, i.e when creating a script that uses zenity or dialog. Using

ls /dev/fd/

will reveal all descriptors you have available in the current shell.

Redirecting them is often necessary to get rid of nasty output or read from a file to read the output later as the output goes faster than your eye.
However you have to make sure that the noclobber option of bash is disabled to overwriting
existing files. Check this by using:

echo $SHELLOPTS

If you see noclobber here in the output you can disable this by using:

set +o noclobber

Basically you have these redirection options for the program myprogram

(1) myprogram > Output.log redirects StdOut to the file Output.log

(2) myprogram >> Output.log appends hate StdOut to the file Output.log

(3) myprogram 2> Output.log writes the StdErr to the Output.log. Respective the same for >>.

(4) myprogram &> Output.log writes StdErr and StdOut to the Output.log file.

Some administrators still using the older and more complected to write
myprogragramm > Output.log 2&>1 . These Construct basically appends the Stderr to StdOut
(2&>1) and than redirects both to the Output.log. Note that bash executes the descriptor redirection from the right hand side to the left hand side. In our example this was the redirection for StdErr appending to StdOut. You can use whatever Descriptor you want N&>M will always concatenate the descriptor N to descriptor M.

(5) myprogram < Input.lst the program reads its input from Input.lst

Remembering what i was writing about the noclobber option. Yeah actually i lied about this. You can force IO-Redicrection by using the >N| construct.

(6) myprogram >2| Output.log, will force the redirection to Output.log

Sometimes, if you write a demonized script for example you will find it useful l to close certain descriptors:

7) 2<&- will close the Input for StdErr.

And guess what

(8) 2>&- does? It closes the Output for StdtErr.

Again this does apply to any file descriptor you may bring to live or that already exists.

Here are two examples what else you can do with IO-Redirection:

If you don't have an Editor you may "create" one by using

cat > My.txt << EOF
foo
bar
EOF

to write foo and bar to the file My.txt. Clearing a file is often done by using
cat /dev/null > Output.log But using:
:> Output.log
is faster to write and does the same. This is because the : applies to nothing in bash. and :> overwrites the file with nothing.

Want Real Logging?

However if you want real logging in a script you have written you may want to use logger and create a proper facility which can be used by syslog or syslog-ng.

logger Script.Err mydaemon.sh

will send logging information to the syslog daemon. You can configure the logging target by editing the /etc/syslog.conf to determine the logging target.