topic Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx in Operating System - HP-UX

Redirecting stderr from mailx

Gary Cooper_1 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:38:11 GMT

Within my script, I want to log/catch any errors that mailx may generate - in particular when it is supplied with an invalid recipient.
when I try to just redirect stderr it just seems to ignore it...

> ll | mailx -s "Test e-mail" bert 2> mail.stderr
> bert... User unknown
<$HOME>/dead.letter... Saved message in <$HOME>/dead.letter
>

Where $HOME is the home directory of the user account that I was logged in as.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Gary

Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:56:39 GMT

Hi Gary:

# ll | mailx -s "Test e-mail" xxx 1>>/tmp/mylog 2>&1

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx

Gary Cooper_1 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:02:49 GMT

Hi James,

It's been a long week! I don't know why I didn't redirect stdout as well in the first place.

As a matter of interest, why didn't my original command work?

Have a good week-end.

Thanks,

Gary

Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:17:15 GMT

Hi (again) Gary:

> As a matter of interest, why didn't my original command work?

The output messages you really wanted to collect are going to STDOUT not STDERR.

I could have suggested you do:

# # ll | mailx -s "Test e-mail" xxx 1>>/tmp/mylog

...and ignored STDERR entirely.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx

Dennis Handly — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:40:49 GMT

>why didn't my original command work?

Because your assumptions and the programmer's about what goes to stderr were different.

With an interactive program like mailx, perhaps this is blurred.

Sometimes as JRF had, you should just log both.

Re: Redirecting stderr from mailx

Gary Cooper_1 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:14:38 GMT

Thanks for the assistance James.