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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I want to do some troubleshooting on my bash script. Is there a short and simple command that generates both stdout and stderr so that I can use 2>&1 on it? Sorry if this looks trivial, but I just can't think of one at the moment.

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1  
ls . *blah (assuming you have some visible files in the current directory and don't have one ending in blah)... –  jasonwryan 2 days ago
    
@jasonwryan, great! That works. Would you mind putting it down as answer? –  Question Overflow 2 days ago

4 Answers 4

up vote 4 down vote accepted

A simple approach would be to use ls to list actual and imaginary files:

ls . *.blah

This assumes that there are visible files in the working directory and that you don't have any files that end in .blah1


1. ...and if you do, we won't judge you.

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1  
That won't work in zsh, fish, csh, tcsh and bash -O failglob. (and ls . may return nothing on stdout if the current directory only has hidden files/dirs). Better ls / /x –  Stéphane Chazelas 2 days ago
up vote 5 down vote

Just write a subshell which sends to stdout and stderr...

(echo STDOUT && echo STDERR >&2)

For proof that it works:

(echo STDOUT && echo STDERR >&2) > STDOUT.txt 2> STDERR.txt

This will create files STDOUT.txt and STDERR.txt containing the words STDOUT and STDERR respectively.

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up vote 2 down vote 
ls / /x
df / /x
wc / /etc/passwd
od / /dev/null

To guaranteed stdout written before stderr:

(w;/) # Bourne/csh like shells only.
sh -c 'w;/'
'time' w
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up vote 1 down vote

You can write a function to use later:

gen_stdout_stderr() {                                                           
    printf "%s\n" "STDERR" >&2                                                  
    printf "%s\n" "STDOUT"                                                      
}

Then:

$ gen_stdout_stderr 
STDERR
STDOUT
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