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Posts Tagged ‘stderr’

Redirect and append STDOUT and STDERR to a log file

June 8th, 2010 Nick No comments

Redirecting STDOUT to a file is easy:

command > foo.log

Redirecting STDERR to a file is also easy:

command 2> foo.log

Redirecting both STDOUT and STDERR to a file is also fairly straightforward:

command &> foo.log

But what if we want to append to the log rather than truncating it each time we write? This is done for STDOUT by using the >> operator, and for STDERR by using 2>>. Unfortunately &>> does not exist, so how do we append both STDOUT and STDERR?

The solution is to redirect STDERR to STDOUT, and then redirect STDOUT to a file using the append operator:

command 1>> foo.txt 2>&1