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I have been trying to figure out the relationship between file descriptors. One thing I don't understand is, how is:

ls -l /bin/usr > ls-output.txt 2>&1

different from:

ls -l /bin/usr 2>&1 >ls-output.txt
Michael Mrozek
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Works On Mine
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2 Answers2

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The order of the redirection is important as they are executed sequentially:

>filename 2>&1

stdout (fd 1) will point to filename and afterwards the stderr (fd 2) will point to the the target of stdout in this example filename.

That means that both stdout and stderr get redirected to filename

2>&1 >filename

Here stderr (fd 2) will point to the target of stdout and afterwards stdout (fd 1) will redirect to filename.

This means that stderr will redirect to the original target of stdout and stdout gets redirected to filename.

So in short the order of redirects is important as each filedescriptor is independent of each other.

Additional Information

For further information have a look at some other questions and answers such as:

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Ulrich Dangel
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They're not.

a>&b redirects fd a to fd b. if a is not given, 1 is assumed. 1 is stdout and 2 is stderr.

Some shells (e.g. Bash) also let you specify &> file to redirect both at the same time. However, > 2>&1 is more portable.

Aaron Jones
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    Aaron,thanks for the reply..I think they are different,the first outputs the stderr to the file but the second outputs the stderr to the stdout(screen)..But i dont get how this happens..both are ultimately pointing to stdout – Works On Mine Mar 25 '13 at 03:40