How to capture output from certain Unix commands |
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I was recently trying to do some simple shell scripting with the command httpd -t, which runs a syntax check on the Apache configuration files. If everything is OK, it returns Syntax OK, otherwise, it will try to tell you what's wrong with the files. I wanted to grab the output of the syntax check and display it in my script, but wasn't having any luck -- any attempt to redirect the output, or assign it to a variable, resulted in nothing (empty variable, empty file, etc.). Unix wizards can stop reading this hint now, for I'm sure you know what the problem is...After much Googling, I discovered that some Unix commands create their output by writing to standard error (STDERR) instead of standard output (the Terminal window, typically). As a result, operations that capture standard output won't work for these types of messages, even though the message itself is displayed in the Terminal window. I found the solution in the ...
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