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Heading in the Right (Re)Direction

If you’ve taken the time to get the hang of terminal basics, you’re probably at the point where you want to start putting together what you’ve learned. Sometimes issuing commands one at a time is enough, but there are cases when it can be tedious to enter command after command just to perform a simple task. This is where the extra symbols on your keyboard come in.

For the shell, the terminal’s command interpreter, those symbols are not wasted keys — they’re powerful operators that can link information together, split it apart, and much more. One of the simplest and most powerful shell operations is redirection.

3 Streams

To understand the workings of redirection, it’s important to know what sources of data your shell can redirect. In Linux there are three “streams” of data. The first is “standard input,” numbered by your system as stream 0 (since computers count from 0). It consists of the information or instructions submitted to the shell for evaluation. Most of the time, this comes from the user typing things into the terminal window.

The second, “standard output,” is numbered as stream 1. As you would imagine, it is the stream of data that the shell outputs after performing some process, usually to the terminal window underneath the command.

The final stream, “standard error,” numbered stream 2, is similar to standard output in that it generally takes the form of data dumped into the terminal window. However, it is conceptually separate from standard output so that the streams can be handled independently if desired. This is helpful when you have a command operating on lots of data in a complicated, error-prone operation, and you don’t want the data and errors produced to get dumped into the same file.

As you’ve probably guessed, redirection involves taking these streams and redirecting them from their usual destination to a different one. This is accomplished using the “>” and “” after the command and before the name of the destination file (with a space on either side).

With redirection, whatever file is specified after the “>” is overwritten, so unless you’re sure you won’t lose anything important, it’s best to give a new name, in which case a file with that name will be created. Let’s call it “date.txt” (the file extension after the period usually isn’t important, but helps us humans with organization). Our command then looks like this:

$ date > date.txt

This isn’t terribly useful, but we can build on it by executing another step. Let’s say you’re trying to monitor how the route your traffic takes over the Internet changes from day to day. The “traceroute” command will tell us every router, including the infrastructural ones in the backbone of the Internet, that our connection goes through from source to destination, the latter being a URL given as an argument.

Since we already have a file with a date in it, it would be practical just to tack on the data from our scan to the end of that file (“date.txt”). To do that, we simply use two “>” characters next to each other (“>>”). Our new redirection looks like this:

$ traceroute google.com >> date.txt

Now all we need to do is change the name of the file to something more descriptive, using the “mv” command with its original name as the first argument and the new name as the second, like so:

$ mv date.txt trace1.txt

By using a “”, we can redirect standard input by substituting a file for it.

Let’s say you have two files, “list1.txt” and “list2.txt”, that each contain an unsorted list. While each list contains items the other does not, there is some overlap. We can find the lines that are in common using the “comm” command, but only if the lists are sorted.

There is a “sort” command, but even though it will return a sorted list to the terminal, it won’t permanently sort the list, which puts us back at square one. We could save the sorted version of each list to its own file using “>” and then run “comm”, but this approach would require two commands when we could accomplish the same thing with one (and without leftover files).

Instead, we can use the “

Jonathan Terrasi

Jonathan Terrasi has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2017. His main interests are computer security (particularly with the Linux desktop), encryption, and analysis of politics and current affairs. He is a full-time freelance writer and musician. His background includes providing technical commentaries and analyses in articles published by the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

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