Let's say you have a series of scripts that you don't own and, therefore, can't modify, that may spawn background processes without redirecting stdout and stderr. I've noticed that in bash, tee'ing the output, as shown in the following example, does not return when the script is done if the background process is still running (and has open file descriptors for stdout or stderr).
./runme.sh 2>&1| tee runme.out
Where runme.sh is defined as:
#!/bin/bash
# Start a fake daemon
perl -e 'while(1) { sleep(1) }' &
printf "Enter your name: "
read name
echo "Goodbye $name"
How can I run scripts like this in bash while capturing all output and get back to the prompt when the script is done?
alternative syntax could be to use process substitution
./runme.sh > >(tee runme.out) 2>&1
this way tee is no more a child process of current shell and shell will wait only for runme.sh termination whereas in a pipeline it's waiting for all process termination.
Note that tee and subprocesses are still running after runme.sh terminates.
does not return when the script is done if the background process is still running (and has open file descriptors for stdout or stderr)
So don't do that. Daemon tools will generally redirect stdout/err for this reason, and you can do it manually too:
perl -e 'while(1) { sleep(1) }' < /dev/null > mydaemon.log 2>&1 &
Now that it's not keeping the pipe open, you can tee robustly without hacks.
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 $PIPE
The second one would leave a pipe file sitting around if something goes wrong with your script, which may or may not be a problem (i.e. maybe you could rm it in the parent shell afterwards).
I know exec is for executing a program in current process as quoted down from here
exec replaces the current program in the current process, without
forking a new process. It is not something you would use in every
script you write, but it comes in handy on occasion.
I'm looking at a bash script a line of which I can't understand exactly.
#!/bin/bash
LOG="log.txt"
exec &> >(tee -a "$LOG")
echo Logging output to "$LOG"
Here, exec doesn't have any program name to run. what does it mean? and it seems to be capturing the execution output to a log file. I would understand if it was exec program |& tee log.txt but here, I cannot understand exec &> >(tee -a log.txt). why another > after &>?
What's the meaning of the line? (I know -a option is for appending and &> is for redirecting including stderr)
EDIT : after I selected the solution, I found the exec &> >(tee -a "$LOG") works when it is bash shell(not sh). So I modified the initial #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash. But exec &>> "$LOG" works both for bash and sh.
From man bash:
exec [-cl] [-a name] [command [arguments]]
If command is not specified, any redirections take effect in the
current shell, [...]
And the rest:
&> # redirects stdout and stderr
>(cmd) # redirects to a process
See process substitution.
I want to copy stdout to a log file from within a bash script, meaning I don't want to call the script with output piped to tee, I want the script itself to handle it. I've successfully used this answer to accomplish this, using the following code:
#!/bin/bash
exec > >(sed "s/^/[${1}] /" | tee -a myscript.log)
exec 2>&1
# <rest of script>
echo "hello"
sleep 10
echo "world"
This works, but has the downside of output being buffered until the script is completed, as is also discussed in the linked answer. In the above example, both "hello" and "world" will show up in the log only after the 10 seconds have passed.
I am aware of the stdbuf command, and if running the script with
stdbuf -oL ./myscript.sh
then stdout is indeed continuously printed both to the file and the terminal.
However, I'd like this to be handled from within the script as well. Is there any way to combine these two solutions? I'd rather not resort to a wrapper script that simply calls the original script enclosed with "stdbuf -oL".
You can use a workaround and make the script execute itself with stdbuf, if a special argument is present:
#!/bin/bash
if [[ "$1" != __BUFFERED__ ]]; then
prog="$0"
stdbuf -oL "$prog" __BUFFERED__ "$#"
else
shift #discard __BUFFERED__
exec > >(sed "s/^/[${1}] /" | tee -a myscript.log)
exec 2>&1
# <rest of script>
echo "hello"
sleep 1
echo "world"
fi
This will mostly work:
if you run the script with ./test, it shows unbuffered [] hello\n[] world.
if you run the script with ./test 123 456, it shows [123] hello\n[123] world like you want.
it won't work, however, if you run it with bash test - $0 is set to test which is not your script. Fixing this is not in the scope of this question though.
The delay in your first solution is caused by sed, not by tee. Try this instead:
#!/bin/bash
exec 6>&1 2>&1>&>(tee -a myscript.log)
To "undo" the tee effect:
exec 1>&6 2>&6 6>&-
I run my_program via a bash wrapper script, and use exec to prevent forking a separate process:
#! /bin/bash
exec my_program >> /tmp/out.log 2>&1
Now I would like to duplicate all output into two different files, but still prevent forking, so I do not want to use a pipe and tee like this:
#! /bin/bash
exec my_program 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/out.log >> /tmp/out2.log
How to do that with bash?
The reasons for avoid forking is to make sure that:
all signals sent to the bash script also reaches my_program (including non-trappable signals).
waitpid(3) on the bash-script can never return before my_program has also terminated.
I think the best you can do is to redirect standard output and error to tee via a process substitution:
exec > >( tee -a /tmp/out.log >> /tmp/out2.log) 2>&1
then exec to replace the bash script with your program (which will keep the same open file handles to standard output).
exec my_program