Shell redirection i/o order

Question

I\'m playing with i/o shell redirection. The commands I\'ve tried (in bash):

ls -al *.xyz 2>&1 1> files.lst

and

l         


        

Answer 1

This error:

ls: *.xyz: No such file or directory

is being written on stderr by ls binary.

However in this command:

ls -al *.xyz 2>&1 1> files.lst

You're first redirecting stderr to stdout which by default goes to tty (terminal)

And then you're redirecting stdout to a file files.lst, however remember that stderr doesn't redirected to file since you have stderr to stdout redirection before stdout to file redirection. Your stderr still gets written to tty in this case.

However in 2nd case you change the order of redirections (first stdout to file and then stderr to stdout) and that rightly redirects stderr to a file which is also being used by stdout.