On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 07:45:10PM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote: > Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> writes: > > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 06:56:31AM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote: > >> foo 2>&1 | bar > > The pipeline is created first, and *then* the dup (2>&1) is > > performed. > This is true, but not obviously so. If you have the rule "redirections > are processed from left to right", then this looks like an outlier (if > you treat the pipe as another kind of redirection).
Well... that's the way the shell works. It's one of the things you need to understand if you're working with complex shell scripts. Even if the Bash |& extension is embraced by the community, you'll still need to understand how foo 2>&1 | bar works if you're doing work in POSIX or Bourne shells. It kinda reminds me of the Linux newcomers who don't know how to do gzip -dc foo.tar.gz | tar xvf - (and so on) because they've been trained to use GNU tar's "z" flag instead, and therefore that piece of their education hasn't been absorbed yet.
