Re: what is 2>&1 ? why not & only ?

[Michael Fuhr]

On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 06:38:19PM +0200, Evren Yurtesen wrote:

> I was looking into the RunCache script and I have
> seen that 2>&1 is used for backgrounding the job
> but why not & only ?
> what is the difference?

2>&1 is redirection, not backgrounding.  In Bourne Shell & friends it
means that output going to file descriptor 2 (stderr) should go the
same place as file descriptor 1 (stdout).

-- 
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.net/~mfuhr/