Streams

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Streams

On the command line, or terminal, there are three very important lanes where information can be sent, we call these streams. A single command can take information in from STDIN and then send information out on both STDOUT and STDERR simultaneously.

STDIN

For example, we can send the contents of a file as a STDIN steam to the wc command in order to count the lines:

wc -l < file.txt

STDOUT

The STDOUT steam is probably the most often used, since this is how commands send information to the screen. However, if we do not want the information printed to the screen, we can send it into a file for later review:

ls > output.txt    # Overwrite contents in output file with `ls` results

You can also append to the same file, if more information is to be saved:

ls >> output.txt     # Append results from `ls` to the bottom of the file

STDERR

The error stream is very useful to separate error messages (or warnings) from real output (your results). Since there is no -e flag for the ls command this will generate an error. We can then store this error in a by redirecting the error stream with 2>.

ls -e 2> errors.txt

Tips

Combined streams

If you want to combined your STDOUT with your STDERR stream and store it into a file, you can do this with &>, like so:

command &> output_and_errors.txt

Trash Streams

If you want to ignore all information from STDOUT and STDERR you can send both of these streams to the trash (/dev/null):

command &> /dev/null

This can be useful when you are only interested in the resulting file that your command will create.