Quick Tip

Tame Your Terminal: Unified Logging with `2>&1`

Challenge: When running commands or scripts, you often get both standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) messages. Separately analyzing these can be cumbersome, especially when trying to capture all output for logging or debugging.

The Solution: Redirect both standard output and standard error to a single destination using the `2>&1` redirection operator.

your_command &> output.log

Why it works: The `&>` operator is a shorthand for redirecting both stdout and stderr. Alternatively, you can explicitly use `2>&1` after redirecting stdout: `your_command > output.log 2>&1`.

Pro-Tip: Use `tee` to view output on the terminal while simultaneously saving it to a file: `your_command 2>&1 | tee output.log`

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 5/28/2026