How to print 'make' error message to a file
 

I tried to compile beaver-0.3.0 but got many error messages while using 'make' command. I tried to diagnose the problem but I cannot scroll up the screen further enougth (even using rxvt) to see the first error. I tried to use make >> filename, or make -d >> filename. The former one only printed a few make info, and the latter one printed debug info other than error info. Could someone give me an idea? Thank you!

Programs which run the terminal have two output file handles - standard output and standard error, which have identifier numbers 1 and 2 respectively. "Normal" output customarily goes to standard output, and error messages and warnings typically go to standard error.

When you re-direct output using > or >>, this re-directs only standard output (the former truncating the target file first, the latter appending to the file).

In Borne style shells (including bash, which is a very common interactive shell on Linux systems), you can re-direct standard error using 2> and 2>>. For your purposes, you probably want to re-direct them both to the same file. You can do this by saying "2>&1", which means "take output on standard error and send it wherever standard output goes". This is how: