Question

I write a bash file in which i used read command to read data from a file.

If the file wasn’t there I want to save the error into a text file. I tried:

read myVariable < myFile  2> errorFile.txt

it doesn’t work, and many other efforts faild such as:

myVar=`read myVariable < myFile`

Answer 1

You need to redirect STDERR first before you tell bash to read from a file that doesn’t exist

This will work for you:

$ read myVariable 2> errorFile < myFile

or

$ 2> errorFile.txt read myVariable < myFile