Travis B. Hartwell / Software Craftsman

It has taken me ages to figure this out. Googling has been fruitless. Finally, after some tinkering, I was able to figure out how to properly redirect stdout and stderr to a file plus display them from within a script. Here's the idiom:

#!/bin/bash

OUTPUT_LOG=output.log
OUTPUT_PIPE=output.pipe

if [ ! -e $OUTPUT_PIPE ]; then
    mkfifo $OUTPUT_PIPE
fi

if [ -e $OUTPUT_LOG ]; then
    rm $OUTPUT_LOG
fi

exec 3>&1 4>&2
tee $OUTPUT_LOG < $OUTPUT_PIPE >&3 &
tpid=$!
exec > $OUTPUT_PIPE 2>&1

echo "This is on standard out"
echo "This is on standard err" >&2

exec 1>&3 3>&- 2>&4 4>&-
wait $tpid

rm $OUTPUT_PIPE

It works but it might not be entirely correct, particularly the exec &> /dev/null. Improvements or suggestions are welcome.

Update: Figured it out. I had to store stderr and then restore stdout and stderr and close the fd that I stored them in.

Update update: Looked back and realized I had a typo on my first exec line.