redirect temporarily STDOUT to another file descriptor, but still to screen

Posted by Carlos Campderrós on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Carlos Campderrós
Published on 2012-04-16T09:20:21Z Indexed on 2012/04/16 11:32 UTC
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I'm making a script that executes some commands inside, and these commands show some output on STDOUT (and STDERR as well, but that's no problem). I need that my script generates a .tar.gz file to STDOUT, so the output of some commands executed in the script also go to STDOUT and this ends with a not valid .tar.gz file in the output.

So, in short, it's possible to output the first commands to the screen (as I still want to see the output) but not via STDOUT? Also I would like to keep the STDERR untouched so only error messages appear there.

A simple example of what I mean. This would be my script:

#!/bin/bash

# the output of these commands shouldn't go to STDOUT, but still appear on screen
some_cmd foo bar
other_cmd baz

#the following command creates a tar.gz of the "whatever" folder,
#and outputs the result to STDOUT
tar zc whatever/

I've tried messing with exec and the file descriptors, but I still can't get it to work:

#!/bin/bash

# save STDOUT to #3
exec 3>&1

# the output of these commands should go to #3 and screen, but not STDOUT
some_cmd foo bar
other_cmd baz

# restore STDOUT
exec 1>&3

# the output of this command should be the only one that goes to STDOUT
tar zc whatever/

I guess I'm lacking closing STDOUT after the first exec and reopen it again or something, but I can't find the right way to do it (right now the result is the same as if I didn't add the execs

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