Re: capturing stderr to variable.

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 5:18 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
> Gentlemen:
>
> 'highlight' seems to have no return value. If you feed it a file who's type
> it does not recognize, it sends a message to stderr. To create a test for
> that, I'm doing this:
>
>    $ highlight $filename 2> /tmp/highlight_err
>    [ -s "/tmp/highlight_err" ] &&
>    echo="Highlighting is active, but the file is not recognized."
>    rm /tmp/highlight_err > /dev/null
>
> ... which is clumsy.  Researching it, I find that there's no simple way to
> redirect stderr to a variable, or to some other way of capturing the error
> condition. Suggestions involve things like:
>
>     ... 2>&4 1>&3; } 2>&1 )
>
> ... which I'd not use anyway for clarity's sake.  Any suggestions?  I was
> wondering, since redirection and piping are (I believe) at about the same
> level of parsing, one might suppose that " ... 2| " would be legal.  That is
> to say that we could sent stderr to a command as well as to a file.

foo 2> >(bar)

-- 
Mikael Magnusson