CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellunixio-redirectionbzip2
Pentarctagon
Pentarctagon

Reputation: 423

Write bzip2 version information to file

I'm trying to write the result of:

bzip2 --version

to a file. However, nothing seems to be able to "see" the version info that's printed onto the screen. For example:

bzip2 --version > test.txt

creates an empty file and

bzip2 --version | grep Version

prints the entire paragraph of text, whereas

gcc --version | grep gcc

prints only the line with "gcc" on it.

What is bzip2's --version flag doing differently, and how do I capture it's output?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 153

Answers (1)

Mureinik
Mureinik

Reputation: 311163

The output of bzip --version is written to stderr, not stdout, so it has to be redirected with 2> instead of a plain old >:

mureinik@computer ~ $ bzip2 --version 2> test.txt

Upvotes: 2

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