Is it possible to redirect all of the output of a Bourne shell script to somewhere, but with shell commands inside the script itself?
Redirecting the output of a single command is easy, but I want something more like this:
#!/bin/sh if [ ! -t 0 ]; then # redirect all of my output to a file here fi # rest of script... Meaning: if the script is run non-interactively (for example, cron), save off the output of everything to a file. If run interactively from a shell, let the output go to stdout as usual.
I want to do this for a script normally run by the FreeBSD periodic utility. It’s part of the daily run, which I don’t normally care to see every day in email, so I don’t have it sent. However, if something inside this one particular script fails, that’s important to me and I’d like to be able to capture and email the output of this one part of the daily jobs.
Update: Joshua’s answer is spot-on, but I also wanted to save and restore stdout and stderr around the entire script, which is done like this:
# save stdout and stderr to file # descriptors 3 and 4, # then redirect them to "foo" exec 3>&1 4>&2 >foo 2>&1 # ... # restore stdout and stderr exec 1>&3 2>&4
Addressing the question as updated.
The braces ‘{ … }’ provide a unit of I/O redirection. The braces must appear where a command could appear – simplistically, at the start of a line or after a semi-colon. (Yes, that can be made more precise; if you want to quibble, let me know.)
You are right that you can preserve the original stdout and stderr with the redirections you showed, but it is usually simpler for the people who have to maintain the script later to understand what’s going on if you scope the redirected code as shown above.
The relevant sections of the Bash manual are Grouping Commands and I/O Redirection. The relevant sections of the POSIX shell specification are Compound Commands and I/O Redirection. Bash has some extra notations, but is otherwise similar to the POSIX shell specification.