How do I write stderr to a file while using "tee" with a pipe?

Solution 1:

I'm assuming you want to still see STDERR and STDOUT on the terminal. You could go for Josh Kelley's answer, but I find keeping a tail around in the background which outputs your log file very hackish and cludgy. Notice how you need to keep an exra FD and do cleanup afterward by killing it and technically should be doing that in a trap '...' EXIT.

There is a better way to do this, and you've already discovered it: tee.

Only, instead of just using it for your stdout, have a tee for stdout and one for stderr. How will you accomplish this? Process substitution and file redirection:

command > >(tee -a stdout.log) 2> >(tee -a stderr.log >&2)

Let's split it up and explain:

> >(..)

>(...) (process substitution) creates a FIFO and lets tee listen on it. Then, it uses > (file redirection) to redirect the STDOUT of command to the FIFO that your first tee is listening on.

Same thing for the second:

2> >(tee -a stderr.log >&2)

We use process substitution again to make a tee process that reads from STDIN and dumps it into stderr.log. tee outputs its input back on STDOUT, but since its input is our STDERR, we want to redirect tee's STDOUT to our STDERR again. Then we use file redirection to redirect command's STDERR to the FIFO's input (tee's STDIN).

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/InputAndOutput

Process substitution is one of those really lovely things you get as a bonus of choosing bash as your shell as opposed to sh (POSIX or Bourne).

In sh, you'd have to do things manually:

out="${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/out.$$" err="${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/err.$$"
mkfifo "$out" "$err"
trap 'rm "$out" "$err"' EXIT
tee -a stdout.log < "$out" &
tee -a stderr.log < "$err" >&2 &
command >"$out" 2>"$err"

Solution 2:

why not simply:

./aaa.sh 2>&1 | tee -a log

This simply redirects stderr to stdout, so tee echoes both to log and to screen. Maybe I'm missing something, because some of the other solutions seem really complicated.

Note: Since bash version 4 you may use |& as an abbreviation for 2>&1 |:

./aaa.sh |& tee -a log

Solution 3:

This may be useful for people finding this via google. Simply uncomment the example you want to try out. Of course, feel free to rename the output files.

#!/bin/bash

STATUSFILE=x.out
LOGFILE=x.log

### All output to screen
### Do nothing, this is the default


### All Output to one file, nothing to the screen
#exec > ${LOGFILE} 2>&1


### All output to one file and all output to the screen
#exec > >(tee ${LOGFILE}) 2>&1


### All output to one file, STDOUT to the screen
#exec > >(tee -a ${LOGFILE}) 2> >(tee -a ${LOGFILE} >/dev/null)


### All output to one file, STDERR to the screen
### Note you need both of these lines for this to work
#exec 3>&1
#exec > >(tee -a ${LOGFILE} >/dev/null) 2> >(tee -a ${LOGFILE} >&3)


### STDOUT to STATUSFILE, stderr to LOGFILE, nothing to the screen
#exec > ${STATUSFILE} 2>${LOGFILE}


### STDOUT to STATUSFILE, stderr to LOGFILE and all output to the screen
#exec > >(tee ${STATUSFILE}) 2> >(tee ${LOGFILE} >&2)


### STDOUT to STATUSFILE and screen, STDERR to LOGFILE
#exec > >(tee ${STATUSFILE}) 2>${LOGFILE}


### STDOUT to STATUSFILE, STDERR to LOGFILE and screen
#exec > ${STATUSFILE} 2> >(tee ${LOGFILE} >&2)


echo "This is a test"
ls -l sdgshgswogswghthb_this_file_will_not_exist_so_we_get_output_to_stderr_aronkjegralhfaff
ls -l ${0}

Solution 4:

To redirect stderr to a file, display stdout to screen, and also save stdout to a file:

./aaa.sh 2>ccc.out | tee ./bbb.out

EDIT: To display both stderr and stdout to screen and also save both to a file, you can use bash's I/O redirection:

#!/bin/bash

# Create a new file descriptor 4, pointed at the file
# which will receive stderr.
exec 4<>ccc.out

# Also print the contents of this file to screen.
tail -f ccc.out &

# Run the command; tee stdout as normal, and send stderr
# to our file descriptor 4.
./aaa.sh 2>&4 | tee bbb.out

# Clean up: Close file descriptor 4 and kill tail -f.
exec 4>&-
kill %1

Solution 5:

In other words, you want to pipe stdout into one filter (tee bbb.out) and stderr into another filter (tee ccc.out). There is no standard way to pipe anything other than stdout into another command, but you can work around that by juggling file descriptors.

{ { ./aaa.sh | tee bbb.out; } 2>&1 1>&3 | tee ccc.out; } 3>&1 1>&2

See also How to grep standard error stream (stderr)? and When would you use an additional file descriptor?

In bash (and ksh and zsh), but not in other POSIX shells such as dash, you can use process substitution:

./aaa.sh > >(tee bbb.out) 2> >(tee ccc.out)

Beware that in bash, this command returns as soon as ./aaa.sh finishes, even if the tee commands are still executed (ksh and zsh do wait for the subprocesses). This may be a problem if you do something like ./aaa.sh > >(tee bbb.out) 2> >(tee ccc.out); process_logs bbb.out ccc.out. In that case, use file descriptor juggling or ksh/zsh instead.