First off stderr and stdin and stdout, whats that? They are file handles / file descriptors. Any program display stuff on the screen thats stdout and stderr. Errors and help messages get put on the screen using stderr. When you do the | command have you noticed it only pipes out stdout. What if you wanted
Good article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_descriptor
Good cheatsheet: http://www.catonmat.net/download/bash-redirections-cheat-sheet.pdf
For example
service –status-all Has alot of output, and trying to pipe for example to see if apache is running service –status-all | egrep “apache” will not show any out. Why? Because all ofservice –status-all output is in stderr. So we need to redirect stderr out to the pipe and then to grep… But how?
SYNTAX:
THESE PIPE ONLY stderr thru the pipe:
command 2>&1 > /dev/null | command2
ALSO:
command 2>&1 | command 2
OR – this pipes stdout and stdin thru the pipe:
command |& command
COMMON EXAMPLE – for service all, helps (helps are outputed as stderr lots of the time):
rsync –help 2>&1 > /dev/null | egrep -i “log”
rsync –help |& egrep -i “log”
service –status-all |& egrep -i “apache”
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Im copy pasting the important stuff here… Taking no credit for it, its all by the wonderful people at stackoverflow – where you questions get answered
New BASH and other shells:
Bash 4 has this feature:
If `|&’ is used, the standard error of command1 is connected to command2’s standard input through the pipe; it is shorthand for 2>&1 |. This implicit redirection of the standard error is performed after any redirections specified by the command.
zsh also has this feature.
—
With other/older shells, just enter this explicitly as
FirstCommand 2>&1 | OtherCommand
You can also Swap process:
( proc1 3>&1 1>&2- 2>&3- ) | proc2
Provided stdout and stderr both pointed to the same place at the start, this will give you what you need.
What it does:
3>&1
creates a new file handle 3 which is set to the current 1 (original stdout) just to save it somewhere.
1>2-
sets stdout to got to the current file handle 2 (original stderr) then closes 2.
2>3-
sets stderr to got to the current file handle 3 (original stdout) then closes 3.
It’s effectively the swap command you see in sorting:
temp = value1;
value1 = value2;
value2 = temp;