Hi, Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > would anyone ever code: > bin/mailwatcher 2>&1 >/dev/null > when surely all they need is > bin/mailwatcher >/dev/null
Interesting question. (Like what is the use case of cat(1) ?) Surely this is one of the less useful variations of the rules for redirection. Let's assume a subordinate script which expects to get started with stdout redirected to some non-vanilla target. For some reason it could decide to direct the stderr of one of its own sub-subordinate scripts to stdout as prepared by its superior script and to direct the sub-subordinate stdout to /dev/null. Superior: subordinate | result_consumer Subordinate ... echo "Note: Switching to diagnostic output mode" subsubordinate 2>&1 >/dev/null ... Subsubordinate: ... some (in this case) invalid output to stdout ... echo "Failed because ..." >&2 ... Have a nice day :) Thomas