On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, ZyX wrote:

> Reply to message «Tee all output to log file?»,
> sent 02:41:26 02 February 2011, Wednesday
> by Benjamin R. Haskell:
>
>> Is there something straightforward that I'm overlooking?  Is there a 
>> commonly used utility for this?  (`script` comes to mind, but I 
>> recall klunkiness when trying it in the past.)
> If you don't like script, maybe you should try screen:
>
>    (( $+logfile )) && \
>        exec screen -L -c =(echo "logfile $logfile") -m -S script-$0 $0 $@

I find `screen` even more annoying than `script` for scripting purposes, 
wonderful though it is for interactive use.

I really just want the redirection, not the many extra features that 
`screen` adds.

Adding


> Does anybody know, why it does not work when I start screen in detached mode?

Cf. above annoyance.  For doing something with Vim under Apache (using 
:TOhtml), I recently resorted to this hackery:

screen -q -d -m -S $sessionname vim -u NONE -N +'so $scriptname'
(Then, loop, waiting for one of:
1: the Vim script to touch a marker file that indicated completion
2: a specified timeout, in case something errored out, preventing a 
clean Vim exit
)
screen -X -S $sessionname quit



Despite my annoyance (I'm easily annoyed), I tried your above 
suggestion.  It didn't capture stderr, so I added a flag that logging 
was in progress and added a redirect for it (also added '-q' to the 
`screen` commands):

(( $+logfile && ! $+doinglogging )) \
    && exec env doinglogging=true screen -L -c =(echo "logfile $logfile") -q -m -S script-$0 $0 $@
(( $+doinglogging )) && exec 2>&1

Seems okay for what I'm doing.

Thanks,
Ben