Input/output redirections and pipes

categories:

• RHCE

Today is the day I’m diving into the docs getting ready for the RHCE exam (exam on April 20) I’m adding a RHCE category to the site. I’ll put all my study notes in there.

Feel free to drop a comment if you have any useful tip or trick !

Let’s begin with the basics..

Standard input (stdin) : 0 Standard output (stdout) : 1 Error output (stderr) : 2

: output redirection

append output | : pass the output to the next utility || : execute the next command if the previous failed && : execute the next command only if the previous has succeded

Examples :

1. ls -l test.txt > /tmp/output.txt

If test.txt exists, the output will be written in /tmp/output.txt If test.txt doesn’t exist, the error message will be output to the screen while nothing will be written to /tmp/output.txt (but the file will be created if not existing)

2. ls -l test.txt 2> /tmp/error_output.txt > /tmp/output.txt Now, the error message would be output to /tmp/error_output.txt if the file doesn’t exist

3. ls -l test.txt 2> /tmp/error_output.txt >> /tmp/output.txt The error output would still go in error_output.txt while the standard output would be APPENDED to output.txt

4. cat file1 > file2 Will copy the content of file1 to file2

5. cat > file3 Hello world ^D

Will write “Hello world” to file3

6. wc count_test.txt This would count the number of lines, words and bytes in test.txt (“wc < test.txt”) and output the result to count_test.txt

Several ways of counting lines etc. : $ wc test.txt 7 2 17 test.txt $ wc < test.txt 7 2 17 $ cat test.txt | wc 7 2 17

ls -l test10 2>&1 | mail -s "output in a mail" address@domain.be Any output in a mail