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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers exec command and field descriptors.. Post 58924 by Perderabo on Saturday 4th of December 2004 04:02:16 PM
Old 12-04-2004
The trouble is that exec can do several different things...it really needs to be several commands. The code you gave won't work. Change that to
exec $fd < inputfile
and it probably will. But that is not what's meant by an fd.

A fd is always an integer. In shell scripts, it will be a very low integer. By convention:
0 = standard input
1 = standard output
2 = standard error output

The idea is that you write your program to output to fd 1 without knowing what fd one is. Then at execution time you can do stuff like:
echo this > first.file
echo that > second.file

It would be terrible if echo always sent stuff to "first.file". You would need to do:
echo that
cp first.file second.file
or something like that.

By default 0 1 2 are all connected to /dev/tty so you can type input to a program and see the results in your window.

Here is an experiment I just did:
$ expr 1 + 2
3
$ expr 1 + 2 > expr.out
$ cat expr.out
3
$ expr cat + dog > expr.out
expr: non-numeric argument
$

With the last expr command, I have an error. Since the error goes to 2 which is still /dev/tty, I see it immediately, even though the standard which is 1 goes to a file. That why we have both 1 and 2. You can send 1 into a file while 2 is still displayed to you.

Don't want to see error messages? Bad idea usually, but you can do:
expr cat + dog > expr.out 2>/dev/null

And now error messages are thrown away.

expr cat + dog > expr.out
really means
expr cat + dog 1> expr.out
but if you leave the integer off, 1 is assumed for > while 0 is assumed for <
 

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expr(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   expr(1)

Name
       expr - evaluate expressions

Syntax
       expr arg...

Description
       The arguments are taken as an expression.  After evaluation, the result is written on the standard output.  Each token of the expression is
       a separate argument.

       The operators and keywords are listed below.  The list is in order of increasing precedence, with equal precedence operators grouped.

       expr | expr	   Yields the first expr if it is neither null nor 0.  Otherwise yields the second expr.

       expr & expr	   Yields the first expr if neither expr is null or 0.	Otherwise yields 0.

       expr relop expr	   The relop is one of < <= = != >= > and yields 1 if the indicated comparison is true, '0' if false.  The  comparison	is
			   numeric if both expr are integers, otherwise lexicographic.

       expr + expr
	    expr - expr
			   Yields addition or subtraction of the arguments.

       expr * expr
	    expr / expr
	    expr % expr
			   Yields multiplication, division, or remainder of the arguments.

       expr : expr	   The	matching  operator compares the string first argument with the regular expression second argument; regular expres-
			   sion syntax is the same as that of The (...) pattern symbols can be used to select a portion of the  first  argument.
			   Otherwise, the matching operator yields the number of characters matched ('0' on failure).

       ( expr ) 	   parentheses for grouping.

Examples
       The first example adds 1 to the Shell variable a:
       a=`expr $a + 1`
       The second example finds the file name part (least significant part) of the pathname stored in variable a,
       expr $a : '.*/(.*)' '|' $a
       Note the quoted Shell metacharacters.

Diagnostics
       The command returns the following exit codes:

       0    The expression is neither null nor '0'.

       1    The expression is null or '0'.

       2    The expression is invalid.

See Also
       ed(1), sh(1), test(1)

																	   expr(1)
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