In this post I'm going to show you my favorite way of logging the output of a command to a log file.

Types of Output

There are two types of output that are important for us, stdout (1) and stderr (2).

Redirect stdout to a File

So the simplest way to redirect all output of a command to a given log file is to use the > operator.

command > all.log

Redirect stderr to a File

To redirect only the errors of a command to a given file you can use 2>.

command 2> error.log

Redirect stdout and stderr to separate Files

You can combine both syntaxes to separate the two and write into different log files.

command > stdout.log 2> stderr.log

Redirect stdout and stderr to the same File

Of course you can also redirect the outputs into the same file.

command > all.log 2>&1

The 2>&1 rewrites the output of stderr (2) to stdout (1).

Redirect to a null Device

If you basically want to ignore some or all output of a command, you can redirect it to a null device instead of a file.

command > /dev/null
command 2> /dev/null
command > /dev/null 2>&1

Use tee to write to File and to Screen

The downside of the methods shown is that they do no longer write the given output to the screen. But there is tee for the rescue! This command writes to a given file and still writes to stdout 🤩

command |& tee all.log

|& is shorthand for 2>&1.

And that's it! 😎