Quick Tip

Tame Your Terminal: Redirect stderr to stdout for Unified Logging

Challenge: When troubleshooting or monitoring processes, you often encounter both standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) messages. Separately viewing these can be cumbersome, especially when you want to capture all output to a single file or pipe it to another command for analysis.

The Solution: Utilize shell redirection to combine stderr with stdout.

command_that_might_error 2>&1 | tee output.log

Why it works: The `2>&1` construct redirects file descriptor 2 (stderr) to file descriptor 1 (stdout). The `| tee output.log` then captures both streams and writes them to `output.log` while also displaying them on your terminal.

Pro-Tip: For commands that produce a lot of output, using `command_that_might_error &> output.log` is a shorthand for redirecting both stdout and stderr to a file without duplicating it on the terminal.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 5/27/2026