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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T13:41:32+00:00

I have a question about what I think is an operator or argument passer

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I have a question about what I think is an operator or argument passer but google hasn’t turned up anything. The script this is contained in is

#!/bin/sh
ln mopac.in FOR005
mopac >& FOR006
mv FOR006 mopac.out

When I call “mopac mopac.in”, the program runs fine, but, for my needs, mopac is called within another program by using this script, but it seems like the input file is failing to pass so mopac is not running. I don’t understand what the “>&” is supposed to do so I am having problems troubleshooting.

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    >& FILE is deprecated bash (from csh) shorthand for > FILE 2>&1, that is, redirect both standard output and standard error. (If /bin/sh is not bash, as is true on a number of Linux distributions, this will elicit an error.) Older bash (before 3.0) preferred this form, so most newer bash still understand it, although possibly very recent bash has finally removed it as they seem to finally be removing deprecated constructs of late.

    Your script there is not passing mopac.in at all, but appears to be assuming that mopac will read its input from FOR005, so uses ln to make it available there. Perhaps you should change the script to read mopac.in as a parameter, just as you’re running it directly.

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