Pipe all output from a command (stderr & stdout)

October 05, 2018|

1 min read

command-line

Originally posted by me on Hashrocket TIL

When you write a bash/zsh script relying on pipes normally you will not be able to pipe through text from the stderr output with a normal pipe.

For example, curl -v prints some information about the request, including it's headers and status into stderr.

If we simply try to pipe the output of curl -v into less we will not see the verbose header and request info:

curl -v https://hashrocket.com | less

Output:

<html lang='en-US'>
<meta charset='UTF-8'>
<title>Ruby on Rails, Elixir, React, mobile design and development | Hashrocket</title>
...

But if we want the stderr output as well we can use the |& syntax:

curl -v https://hashrocket.com |& less

Output:

* Rebuilt URL to: https://hashrocket.com/
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
...
* Connected to hashrocket.com (52.55.191.55) port 443 (#0)
...
<html lang='en-US'>
<meta charset='UTF-8'>
...

🍒 Bonus:

We can also pipe through ONLY the stderr:

curl -v https://hashrocket.com |1>& less

Output (will not contain the html response):

* Rebuilt URL to: https://hashrocket.com/
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
...

h/t Thomas Allen