UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Note that the order of redirections is significant. For example, the command

ls > dirlist 2>&1

directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command

ls 2>&1 > dirlist

directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated from the standard output before the standard output was redirected to dirlist.

... ... ... For example:

... 2>&1

means file descriptor 2 is to be opened for writing as a duplicate of
file descriptor 1 and

exec {n}<file

means open file named file for reading and store the file descriptor
number in variable n.

The order in which redirections are specified is significant. The
shell evaluates each redirection in terms of the (file descriptor,
file) association at the time of evaluation. For example:

... 1>fname 2>&1

first associates file descriptor 1 with file fname. It then associates
file descriptor 2 with the file associated with file descriptor 1 (i.e.
fname). If the order of redirections were reversed, file descriptor 2
would be associated with the terminal (assuming file descriptor 1 had
been) and then file descriptor 1 would be associated with file fname.

If a command is followed by & and job control is not active, then the
default standard input for the command is the empty file /dev/null.
Otherwise, the environment for the execution of a command contains the
file descriptors of the invoking shell as modified by input/output
specifications.

Originally Posted by bakunin

In addition to what RudiC already said: if you want to redirect larger parts of a script i would - simply for better readability - not shift around output streams in a way so that one depends on the other. I would set them separately and independently like this:

Code:

exec 2>/some/file
exec 1>/some/file

If you later decide to redirect one or the other to somewhere else it won't affect the other redirecction at all.

I hope this helps.

bakunin