Sometimes you come across a need to troubleshoot a misbehaving script or program things roll by on the screen too quickly. The other day, I was troubleshooting a script that was blurting out an error and then continuing to open up a “dialog” screen which redraws the entire screen and clears the error. I needed a way to send just the errors to a logfile. If you are familiar with C programming, you’ll realize that there is STDOUT which writes to the console. There is also STDERR which usually writes to the console but cannot be captured with a standard redirect such as:
program 1> logfile.txt
You’ll capture the STDOUT of that program but not any errors. If you want just the errors, you’ll want to use:
program 2> logfile.txt
If you want to grab both the errors and the STDOUT, you can use:
program &> logfile.txt
