Some time ago I had a minor epiphany about Bash redirection. I needed to perform the same command for various files, and each time redirect its results to some file. Normally, I would say
command file_name >> log_file
then press the up
key to bring the last command from the history, change the file_name
, press Enter
and so on.
However, as the documentation says,
The […] redirection operators may precede or appear anywhere within a simple command […].
This means that I can also say
>> log_file command file_name
and then, after pressing up
, I won’t have to back up by the log_file
and the redirection to get to the file_name
I need to change.
Quite useful!