CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellio-redirectionfish
user14492
user14492

Reputation: 2244

Error piping before output

Let’s you have a group of commands, and some give error as follows:

 begin;
     echo “Starting Test";
     ls;
     bad_command -xyz;
 end

If you don’t redirect the output or error the results is as expected i.e.

Starting Test
foo.txt
someotherfile.png
someDir
Unknown command: ‘bad_command’

However, is I pipe the whole block to TextEdit by changing last line to end 2&>1 | open -f -a TextEdit the error comes first in the file, and the order is messed up. This also happens when piping to other commands. Why does that happen, and how can I prevent that?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 55

Answers (1)

malfunctioning
malfunctioning

Reputation: 455

You are having this problem because pipes will buffer stdout but not stderr, and therefore you are getting stderr output first. The only way to solve this is to not use pipes, and instead redirect your output to a temporary file. Then, work with that file for what you need to do.

Upvotes: 1

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