bash4.2, centos
the script
#!/bin/bash
LOG_FILE=$homedir/logs/result.log
exec 3>&1
exec > >(tee -a ${LOG_FILE}) 2>&1
echo
end_shell_number=10
for script in `seq -f "%02g_*.sh" 0 $end_shell_number`; do
if ! bash $homedir/$script; then
printf 'Script "%s" failed, terminating...\n' "$script" >&2
exit 1
fi
done
It basically runs through sub-shells number 00 to 10 and logs everything to a LOG_FILE while also displaying on stdout.
I was watching the log getting stacked with tail -F ./logs/result.log,
and it was working nicely until the log file suddenly got removed.
The sub-shells does nothing related to file descriptors nor the log file. They remotely restart tomcats via ssh commands.
Question :
tee was writing on a log file successfully until the file gets erased and logging stops from then on.
Is there a filesize limit or timeout in tee? Is there any known behavior of tee that it deletes a file?
On what occasion does 'tee' deletes the file it was writing on?
tee does not delete nor truncate the file once it has started writing.
Is there a filesize limit or timeout in tee?
No.
Is there any known behavior of tee that it deletes a file?
No.
Note that file can be removed, but the process (tee) still will wrote the open file descriptor, but the file will not be accessible (see man 3 unlink).
Related
I know how to redirect stdout to a file:
exec > foo.log
echo test
this will put the 'test' into the foo.log file.
Now I want to redirect the output into the log file AND keep it on stdout
i.e. it can be done trivially from outside the script:
script | tee foo.log
but I want to do declare it within the script itself
I tried
exec | tee foo.log
but it didn't work.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Redirect stdout ( > ) into a named pipe ( >() ) running "tee"
exec > >(tee -i logfile.txt)
# Without this, only stdout would be captured - i.e. your
# log file would not contain any error messages.
# SEE (and upvote) the answer by Adam Spiers, which keeps STDERR
# as a separate stream - I did not want to steal from him by simply
# adding his answer to mine.
exec 2>&1
echo "foo"
echo "bar" >&2
Note that this is bash, not sh. If you invoke the script with sh myscript.sh, you will get an error along the lines of syntax error near unexpected token '>'.
If you are working with signal traps, you might want to use the tee -i option to avoid disruption of the output if a signal occurs. (Thanks to JamesThomasMoon1979 for the comment.)
Tools that change their output depending on whether they write to a pipe or a terminal (ls using colors and columnized output, for example) will detect the above construct as meaning that they output to a pipe.
There are options to enforce the colorizing / columnizing (e.g. ls -C --color=always). Note that this will result in the color codes being written to the logfile as well, making it less readable.
The accepted answer does not preserve STDERR as a separate file descriptor. That means
./script.sh >/dev/null
will not output bar to the terminal, only to the logfile, and
./script.sh 2>/dev/null
will output both foo and bar to the terminal. Clearly that's not
the behaviour a normal user is likely to expect. This can be
fixed by using two separate tee processes both appending to the same
log file:
#!/bin/bash
# See (and upvote) the comment by JamesThomasMoon1979
# explaining the use of the -i option to tee.
exec > >(tee -ia foo.log)
exec 2> >(tee -ia foo.log >&2)
echo "foo"
echo "bar" >&2
(Note that the above does not initially truncate the log file - if you want that behaviour you should add
>foo.log
to the top of the script.)
The POSIX.1-2008 specification of tee(1) requires that output is unbuffered, i.e. not even line-buffered, so in this case it is possible that STDOUT and STDERR could end up on the same line of foo.log; however that could also happen on the terminal, so the log file will be a faithful reflection of what could be seen on the terminal, if not an exact mirror of it. If you want the STDOUT lines cleanly separated from the STDERR lines, consider using two log files, possibly with date stamp prefixes on each line to allow chronological reassembly later on.
Solution for busybox, macOS bash, and non-bash shells
The accepted answer is certainly the best choice for bash. I'm working in a Busybox environment without access to bash, and it does not understand the exec > >(tee log.txt) syntax. It also does not do exec >$PIPE properly, trying to create an ordinary file with the same name as the named pipe, which fails and hangs.
Hopefully this would be useful to someone else who doesn't have bash.
Also, for anyone using a named pipe, it is safe to rm $PIPE, because that unlinks the pipe from the VFS, but the processes that use it still maintain a reference count on it until they are finished.
Note the use of $* is not necessarily safe.
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$SELF_LOGGING" != "1" ]
then
# The parent process will enter this branch and set up logging
# Create a named piped for logging the child's output
PIPE=tmp.fifo
mkfifo $PIPE
# Launch the child process with stdout redirected to the named pipe
SELF_LOGGING=1 sh $0 $* >$PIPE &
# Save PID of child process
PID=$!
# Launch tee in a separate process
tee logfile <$PIPE &
# Unlink $PIPE because the parent process no longer needs it
rm $PIPE
# Wait for child process, which is running the rest of this script
wait $PID
# Return the error code from the child process
exit $?
fi
# The rest of the script goes here
Inside your script file, put all of the commands within parentheses, like this:
(
echo start
ls -l
echo end
) | tee foo.log
Easy way to make a bash script log to syslog. The script output is available both through /var/log/syslog and through stderr. syslog will add useful metadata, including timestamps.
Add this line at the top:
exec &> >(logger -t myscript -s)
Alternatively, send the log to a separate file:
exec &> >(ts |tee -a /tmp/myscript.output >&2 )
This requires moreutils (for the ts command, which adds timestamps).
Using the accepted answer my script kept returning exceptionally early (right after 'exec > >(tee ...)') leaving the rest of my script running in the background. As I couldn't get that solution to work my way I found another solution/work around to the problem:
# Logging setup
logfile=mylogfile
mkfifo ${logfile}.pipe
tee < ${logfile}.pipe $logfile &
exec &> ${logfile}.pipe
rm ${logfile}.pipe
# Rest of my script
This makes output from script go from the process, through the pipe into the sub background process of 'tee' that logs everything to disc and to original stdout of the script.
Note that 'exec &>' redirects both stdout and stderr, we could redirect them separately if we like, or change to 'exec >' if we just want stdout.
Even thou the pipe is removed from the file system in the beginning of the script it will continue to function until the processes finishes. We just can't reference it using the file name after the rm-line.
Bash 4 has a coproc command which establishes a named pipe to a command and allows you to communicate through it.
Can't say I'm comfortable with any of the solutions based on exec. I prefer to use tee directly, so I make the script call itself with tee when requested:
# my script:
check_tee_output()
{
# copy (append) stdout and stderr to log file if TEE is unset or true
if [[ -z $TEE || "$TEE" == true ]]; then
echo '-------------------------------------------' >> log.txt
echo '***' $(date) $0 $# >> log.txt
TEE=false $0 $# 2>&1 | tee --append log.txt
exit $?
fi
}
check_tee_output $#
rest of my script
This allows you to do this:
your_script.sh args # tee
TEE=true your_script.sh args # tee
TEE=false your_script.sh args # don't tee
export TEE=false
your_script.sh args # tee
You can customize this, e.g. make tee=false the default instead, make TEE hold the log file instead, etc. I guess this solution is similar to jbarlow's, but simpler, maybe mine has limitations that I have not come across yet.
Neither of these is a perfect solution, but here are a couple things you could try:
exec >foo.log
tail -f foo.log &
# rest of your script
or
PIPE=tmp.fifo
mkfifo $PIPE
exec >$PIPE
tee foo.log <$PIPE &
# rest of your script
rm $PIPE
The second one would leave a pipe file sitting around if something goes wrong with your script, which may or may not be a problem (i.e. maybe you could rm it in the parent shell afterwards).
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.
#...part of script without redirection...
{
#...part of script with redirection...
} > file1 2>file2 # ...and others as appropriate...
#...residue of script without redirection...
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.
Typically we would place one of these at or near the top of the script. Scripts that parse their command lines would do the redirection after parsing.
Send stdout to a file
exec > file
with stderr
exec > file
exec 2>&1
append both stdout and stderr to file
exec >> file
exec 2>&1
As Jonathan Leffler mentioned in his comment:
exec has two separate jobs. The first one is to replace the currently executing shell (script) with a new program. The other is changing the I/O redirections in the current shell. This is distinguished by having no argument to exec.
You can make the whole script a function like this:
main_function() {
do_things_here
}
then at the end of the script have this:
if [ -z $TERM ]; then
# if not run via terminal, log everything into a log file
main_function 2>&1 >> /var/log/my_uber_script.log
else
# run via terminal, only output to screen
main_function
fi
Alternatively, you may log everything into logfile each run and still output it to stdout by simply doing:
# log everything, but also output to stdout
main_function 2>&1 | tee -a /var/log/my_uber_script.log
For saving the original stdout and stderr you can use:
exec [fd number]<&1
exec [fd number]<&2
For example, the following code will print "walla1" and "walla2" to the log file (a.txt), "walla3" to stdout, "walla4" to stderr.
#!/bin/bash
exec 5<&1
exec 6<&2
exec 1> ~/a.txt 2>&1
echo "walla1"
echo "walla2" >&2
echo "walla3" >&5
echo "walla4" >&6
[ -t <&0 ] || exec >> test.log
I finally figured out how to do it. I wanted to not just save the output to a file but also, find out if the bash script ran successfully or not!
I've wrapped the bash commands inside a function and then called the function main_function with a tee output to a file. Afterwards, I've captured the output using if [ $? -eq 0 ].
#! /bin/sh -
main_function() {
python command.py
}
main_function > >(tee -a "/var/www/logs/output.txt") 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo 'Success!'
else
echo 'Failure!'
fi
I want to check if there are any errors with the last command, hence redirecting stderr to a file and checking the file for "error" string.(Only one possible error in this case.)
My script looks like below:
#aquire lock
rm -f /some/path/err.out
MyProgramme 2>/some/path/err.out &
if grep -i "error" /some/path/err.out ; then
echo "ERROR while running MyProgramme, check /some/path/err.out for error(s)"
#release lock
exit 1
fi
'if' condition is giving error 'No such file or directory' on err.out, however I can see the file exists.
Did I miss anything ?.. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
PS: I couldn't check the exit code using $? as it is running in background.
In addition to the file possibly not existing when you call grep, you only call grep once, and it only sees whatever data is currently in the file. grep will not continue reading from the file when it reaches the end, waiting for MyProgramme to complete. Instead, I would recommend using a named pipe as the input to grep. This will cause grep to continue reading from the pipe until MyProgramme does, in fact, complete.
#aquire lock
rm -f /some/path/err.out
p=/some/path/err.out
mkfifo "$p"
MyProgramme 2> "$p" &
if grep -i "error" "$p" ; then
echo "ERROR while running MyProgramme, check /some/path/err.out for error(s)"
#release lock
exit
fi
When you start MyProgramme in the background, it's possible that grep executes before MyProgramme could write (and thus create) to the file /some/path/err.out. That's why even though the file exists later when you check it yourself, grep couldn't find it.
You can wait until the background job completes using wait before inspecting the file using grep.
When I execute the command airodump-ng mon0 >> output.txt , output.txt is empty. I need to be able to run airodump-ng mon0 and after about 5 seconds stop the command , than have access to its output. Any thoughts where I should begin to look? I was using bash.
Start the command as a background process, sleep 5 seconds, then kill the background process. You may need to redirect a different stream than STDOUT for capturing the output in a file. This thread mentions STDERR (which would be FD 2). I can't verify this here, but you can check the descriptor number with strace. The command should show something like this:
$ strace airodump-ng mon0 2>&1 | grep ^write
...
write(2, "...
The number in the write statement is the file descriptor airodump-ng writes to.
The script might look somewhat like this (assuming that STDERR needs to be redirected):
#!/bin/bash
{ airodump-ng mon0 2>> output.txt; } &
PID=$!
sleep 5
kill -TERM $PID
cat output.txt
You can write the output to a file using the following:
airodump-ng [INTERFACE] -w [OUTPUT-PREFIX] --write-interval 30 -o csv
This will give you a csv file whose name would be prefixed by [OUTPUT-PREFIX]. This file will be updated after every 30 seconds. If you give a prefix like /var/log/test then the file will go in /var/log/ and would look like test-XX.csv
You should then be able to access the output file(s) by any other tool while airodump is running.
By airodump-ng 1.2 rc4 you should use following command:
timeout 5 airodump-ng -w my --output-format csv --write-interval 1 wlan1mon
After this command has compeleted you can access it's output by viewing my-01.csv. Please not that the output file is in CSV format.
Your command doen't work because airodump-ng output to stderr instead of stdout!!! So following command is corrected version of yours:
airodump-ng mon0 &> output.txt
The first method is better in parsing the output using other programs/applications.
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.
#...part of script without redirection...
{
#...part of script with redirection...
} > file1 2>file2 # ...and others as appropriate...
#...residue of script without redirection...
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.
Typically we would place one of these at or near the top of the script. Scripts that parse their command lines would do the redirection after parsing.
Send stdout to a file
exec > file
with stderr
exec > file
exec 2>&1
append both stdout and stderr to file
exec >> file
exec 2>&1
As Jonathan Leffler mentioned in his comment:
exec has two separate jobs. The first one is to replace the currently executing shell (script) with a new program. The other is changing the I/O redirections in the current shell. This is distinguished by having no argument to exec.
You can make the whole script a function like this:
main_function() {
do_things_here
}
then at the end of the script have this:
if [ -z $TERM ]; then
# if not run via terminal, log everything into a log file
main_function 2>&1 >> /var/log/my_uber_script.log
else
# run via terminal, only output to screen
main_function
fi
Alternatively, you may log everything into logfile each run and still output it to stdout by simply doing:
# log everything, but also output to stdout
main_function 2>&1 | tee -a /var/log/my_uber_script.log
For saving the original stdout and stderr you can use:
exec [fd number]<&1
exec [fd number]<&2
For example, the following code will print "walla1" and "walla2" to the log file (a.txt), "walla3" to stdout, "walla4" to stderr.
#!/bin/bash
exec 5<&1
exec 6<&2
exec 1> ~/a.txt 2>&1
echo "walla1"
echo "walla2" >&2
echo "walla3" >&5
echo "walla4" >&6
[ -t <&0 ] || exec >> test.log
I finally figured out how to do it. I wanted to not just save the output to a file but also, find out if the bash script ran successfully or not!
I've wrapped the bash commands inside a function and then called the function main_function with a tee output to a file. Afterwards, I've captured the output using if [ $? -eq 0 ].
#! /bin/sh -
main_function() {
python command.py
}
main_function > >(tee -a "/var/www/logs/output.txt") 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo 'Success!'
else
echo 'Failure!'
fi