Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

CA> AFAIK the same as DOS, "> " will redirect it to a file?

WC> Tried that, didn't work, also tried >>.

RJT> That's supposed to append.

WC> I am aware but having tried > and failing what's to lose by trying?

Nothing,  just thought I'd toss that out.

WC> It creates the file but nothing there.

RJT> ...And > didn't?

WC> Created a file and added but a single bit for each entry, no text.

Hm.  What is it that you're trying to snag output from?  It may be that it
doesn't output to stdout,  but instead goes a little more directly,  like
writing to video ram or somesuch.  A number of years back that was
"the way things were done" in _way_ too many programs,  and I
hated it for portability.

RJT> You could try a pipe:  |

WC> Dang, you know I've seen enough Linux syntax to have thought of 
WC> that but didn't, redirect and pipe it into the file that's the 
WC> ticket!. Untried but intuition tells me this is correct.

As long as the program uses stdin and stdout,  yeah.

WC> I recall Ron at Abilities giving a very short script using grep 
WC> that searched the entire drive for a pattern in every file and 
WC> every directory. I may look for that disk on the off chance I saved 
WC> that to file, unlikely though that may be. This would be very 
WC> useful in both learning Linux _and_ figuring out how to fix my SMTP 
WC> authorization problem.

RJT> If you have mc installed the search function in there will look for
RJT> content, too.

WC> I have mc installed however that short script, or actually as we
WC> had it a command line input would very slickly search all 
WC> partitions visable to Linux for a given character string and pipe
WC> it into a file, you could use wildcards too.

WC> I've got to break out the *nix book on scripts in *nix I've got and 
WC> do some serious studying.

Well...

WC> MC can be a hinderence in the long run IMHO keeping you from 
WC> learning far more powerful tools.

Not necessarily.  One of the things that I did after installing was to use
mc's F3 (view) function to look at all sorts of stuff.  Just went all
*over* the HD,  looking at stuff.  This goes for executables,  too.  On
some of them (usually the larger ones) you'll see "ELF" near the
beginning and a bunch of garbage -- those are compiled binaries.  Then
there are scripts,  all over the place.  I was perusing a couple of them
last night and actually sorta understood what was going on in most of it.

WC> I really hope I saved that script to disk and will have a looksee 
WC> in the next day or so and if not resort to that rather heavy text 
WC> on the subject. 

If not,  there are plenty of scripts on your HD already to browse through.

WC> You know what's lacking in *nix, a few led by the hand examples 
WC> right off the bat before they get into deep waters so you get the 
WC> basic idea than run with it.

See above.  

WC> Learning scripting syntax is very high on my list of priorities.

I have a set of files here someplace that does a pretty good job of
describing bash scripting,  let me know if you want 'em.

WC> Run a shell script to search for a string even using wildcards for 
WC> a incomplete character strings than redirect and pipe that into a 
WC> file and blink you're done.

Yep.

WC> If you're going to work at the command line time not spent learning
WC> this early on is soon lost many times over in unnecessary work as 
WC> time moves forward. Now I'm really new to this so bear that in mind 
WC> but that's my thinking on the matter.

Sounds about right to me.

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