Lab No. 5: I/O Redirection

After completing this lab, students will be able to:

  • describe stdout, stdin and stderr
  • run commands that employ I/O redirection
  • work with the contents of files through the cat command
  • apply the tee, sort and uniq commands
  • apply /dev/null to discard output or errors

Standard Input, Standard Output and Standard Error

So far in this class we have run commands and have seen how their output is typically printed on the screen. Also, all the commands that we have run so far have received input from key presses obtained from your keyboard. In this section of the lab we are going to learn how to change the way that programs produce output and receive input. This is done through a mechanism known as I/O redirection.

When you execute commands, the operating system creates a process. Three important file descriptors are assigned to each process:

  • 0: stdin
  • 1: stdout
  • 2: stderr

Standard output, or stdout, is the file where the process write its output. Processes do not need to “know” where the data that they output will be written, it can go to a device (e.g. printer), an ordinary file, a socket, a screen (which is the default behavior for interactive shell sessions), etc. The operating system abstracts the end point where the output is written.

Standard input, or stdin, is the file where the program gets information from. In the same fashion as stdout, the operating system controls the file that a process uses to gather input.

Standard error, or stderr, is the file where errors are written, and for interactive sessions if defaults to the screen.

The following table has some common operators that help to change how stdin, stdout and stderr are assigned to a process.

Operator Effect
> Redirects stdout to a new file. If the file exists, it will be overwritten.
>> Appends stdout to an existing file. If the file does not exist, it will be created.
2> Redirects stder to a new file. If the file exists, it will be overwritten.
2>> Appends stderr to an existing file. If the file does not exist, it will be created.
&> Redirects both stdout and stderr to a new file. If the file exists, it will be overwritten.
&>> Appends both stdout and stderr to an existing file. If the file does not exist, it will be created.
2>&1 Redirects stderr to the same file that stdout is pointing
>&2 Redirects stdout to the same file that stderr is pointing
< Redirects stdin to the contents of a file.
<< Uses text in several lines as stdin (know as a heredoc)

The bit bucket

The file /dev/null is a special file that discards all data written to it. This file is used very often when no output is desired. This file is commonly known as the bit bucket

The cat command

In this lab we are going to make heavy use of the cat command. This command is used to concatenate the contents of files and writes it into stdout. It has the useful feature that if no files are specified, then it reads text from stdin. It is recommended that you spend a few minutes reviewing the cat man pages.

Redirection Part 1

Begin this lab by creating a directory called lab05 inside your home directory, and make it your working directory.

For each one of the following items, you need to run a command. Describe what are for each command stdout, stdin and stderr. Also, answer any questions that might be asked.

  1. Execute the command cat (with no options). Enter some text, and press enter. Repeat that a few times. To exit, type CTRL+d.
  2. Execute the command cat > file1. Enter a few lines of text and exit.
  3. Execute the command cat file1.
  4. Execute the command cat file1 > file2.
  5. Execute the command cat >> file1. Enter a few lines of text and exit. What happened to file1?

Redirection Part 2

  1. Execute the command find /var/log -maxdepth 2. Notice how your terminal screen contains both error messages and also the listing of files within /var/log up to 2 levels deep. Modify this command so all the errors get written to a file called restricted and the normal output gets written to a file called unrestricted`.  How many files restricted restricted? (hint: ``wc is your friend).
  2. Modify the previous command so both errors and output are written to a file called everything
  3. Modify the command from the previous question so output written on the screen without showing any errors or warnings.

Redirection Part 3

  1. Provide a command that will create a file called rootcontents with the listing of the root directory
  2. Run the following commands:
[you@blue ~]$ cat << EOF > part1
> Alabama
> Alaska
> Arizona
> Arkansas
> California
> Colorado
> Connecticut
> Delaware
> Florida
> Georgia
> EOF
[you@blue ~]$ cat << THE_END > part2
> Hawaii
> Idaho
> Illinois
> Indiana
> Iowa
> THE_END

Notice how you can create text files on the fly (i.e. without the need of an editor) with stdin redirection. Explain what is the purpose of the ‘EOF’ and ‘THE_END’ strings that were included on those commands (hint: experiment with different variations of the previous commands)? (Note: If you run into problems, you can exit the prompt by using CTRL+c)

  1. Provide a command that will merge the files part1 and part2 in a single file called 15states.
  2. Suppose there is a file called foo in your working directory. The commands cat foo and cat < foo produce the same result, but they operate differently. Explain what is the technical difference (in terms of stdout and stdin) between these two commands.

Suppose there are two files in your working directory, called foo and bar that have the following contents:

[you@blue ~]$ cat foo
one
two
three
[you@blue ~]$ cat bar
four
five
six
  1. What command will print on the screen a single list with all the numbers from one to six?
  2. What command will append thee contents of bar into foo?

Using Pipes

We can use pipes to create elaborate command sequences where the output from one command is used as the input of another command. This is done using the pipe operator |.

As an example, if you run the command ls -l /usr/bin you’ll get a very long list of files. It will be much nicer to be able to page through those results. The less command is a pager, and it will be great if we could pass the output from the ls command directly without having to write a file on disk. Pipelines allows us to do just that in a very simple way. Try running the command ls -l /usr/bin | less

Pipelines do not have to be composed of only two commands; they can chain as many commands as you need. For example, what if you want to obtain the list of files under /usr/bin that contain the word “gnome” on them, and then inspect thee output on a pager? We can use the grep command to filter the output from ls: ls /usr/bin/ | grep gnome | less

The tee command

The command tee sends its output in two directions at once: anything attached to tee‘s stdin goes to both a file and to its stdout (its name is given because it acts as a “T” junction in a pipe). As an example, the command ls ~ | tee myhome.txt writes the listing of your home directory to both the terminal and to a file called myhome.txt

The uniq command

The unique command takes a list and removes duplicated elements

The sort command

The sort command sorts a list.

The head and tail commands

The head and tail commands allows you to restrict output of a process or the content of a file to a certain number of lines from the top or from the bottom of a file.

Pipes Part 1

In this exercise we will determine how many files of type .png with unique names exist in the /home directory. You will build the command in a series of steps, please make sure that you include the resulting command at each step. Please include in your report all the commands at each step.

  1. Begin with providing a command that will list all the files recursively ls -R /home.You will have a very long output and some error messages due to permissions. The first task is to use redirection so you will not get any error messages in the output.
  2. The next step is to filter so only the files that end with .png are shown. Note that the . is a globing character so you will need to escape it (the default escape character is \). Provide an augmented command so the output only reflects files that end in .png by calling grep with the regular expression \.png$.
  3. Enhance the command so the returned list is sorted.
  4. Enhance the command so the returned list does not have any duplicated items
  5. Add a pipe to the wc command so the number of files is printed (use the -l option to only print the number of lines)
  6. Modify the previous command so the list of files is written to a file called `png_list but it still prints the number of files to the screen.

Pipes Part 2

  1. Provide a command that will create a file called “newest_files” that will contain the 5 files with the newest modification date in the /usr/bin directory.