This is probably something easy that I just missed, but here goes.
I am writing a backup script that uses dump. Standard output from the command are being written to a logfile but But I can't get dump to write it's output to the log file. an example of what I'm trying to do is below

export LOGFILE=/root/logs/backup.log
echo "Beginning backup" >$LOGFILE
dump -u -f /dev/st1 /root >>$LOGFILE

the output is still being sent to the screen. What am I missing?

dump's output is probably being printed on stdout. Add '2>&1' after the redirection to the logfile.

dump -u -f /dev/st1 /root >>$LOGFILE 2>&1

exactly. This redirects IO stream '2' (standard error) to the same place as stream '1' (standard output), where you have already set it to append to the logfile.

I tried the redirection of STDOUT and STDERR,

dump -u -f /dev/st1 /root >>$LOGFILE 2>&1

but it does not work. Maybe I have the syntax wrong here?

That's very odd. You're getting output from dump?

from dump. It lists the progress, and that sort of thing. I would prefer to have it redirected to my log file, but it doesn't seem to want to cooperate.

I had a similar problem when writing my back-up script. I too did the 2>&1, but it did not the effect that both stdout and stderr were written to my logfile.

This code does it:

do
star -diff -vv f=$dumpdevice -C $dir . 2>>$logfilename
done >>$logfilename

The output of stderr goes to the log file because of the 2>>$logfilename.

The output of stdout goes to the log file because of
do
[..]
done >> $logfilename

Don't ask me why. Sometimes I think that the designers of Bash wrote the interpreter, and discovered afterwards how some command turned out to work.

BTW, why do you export LOGFILE=/root/logs/backup.log? Just LOGFILE=/root/logs/backup.log should be enough for this script. Or maybe I don't understand it at all and that is why I had to use this workaround in my own script anyway.

You can find the entire script here . It is not perfect, but it is useful. It does nice logging of both the events and provides a full list of backed-up files.

jlinkels

My guess is that dump (and other utilities) may be stupidly calling freopen on devices. In other words, they're not doing the right thing.