I have an embedded Linux system with a very tiny amount of disk space. This system needs to run a program that continuously streams text to standard output, and I need to capture and log this information in case its needed for debugging purposes later. The embedded system is on a local network with a Linux server, and its on this server that I want to store the output log of the program running on the embedded system. So, what I am seeking is a way to stream output from the program across the network to the server, and the server will feed this data into a log file.


I thought that I could use nc/netcat to achieve this goal, but I'm having difficulty and haven't been able to find any good examples for how I could get this to work. Additionally, this log streaming is all going in a script file (one script on the server, and another on the embedded system) which needs to do many other things. So here's what I've got so far:

Server-side:
Embedded-side:

The server side script calls NC to listen on a port I specify, instructs it to place its output in a file in /tmp, and launches the process to run in the background. Then it uses ssh to execute the script on the embedded side. The embedded side script launches the program and attempts to send its output across the network via nc.

But right now the server-side output file doesn't get populated (its empty) and the ssh command does not return until the test_deltatau program is completely finished (it should return immediately after launching said program). So I think that nc isn't being fed this output data at all right now.


I may be using nc all wrong, or maybe there's a better tool for this job than nc. I'm still playing around and trying a few different ideas that I have, but I was hoping that someone had experience solving this problem and was willing to share their advice. I'm trying to use as simple of a solution as possible, hopefully not requiring any custom software that is not already on a standard Linux system (recall, my embedded Linux system is very short on disc space). Thanks.

Well upon further investigation these commands do work correctly if I do them on the command line instead of calling them within my script. So I'm wondering if somehow using ssh is screwing things up. I'm scratching my head at this now.

I think you need
so that it detaches completely from the session.
Also the ssh cmd is calling /root/test_deltatau and so is the embedded side; isn't that recursive/redundant ?

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Thanks, I'll give that a try and let you know if I get it to work or not.


The ssh command is actually calling /root/system_deltatau, which is a different script than test_deltatau. test_deltatau is just a temporary placeholder script to use for debugging until I get this working, then I'll call the actual program I want to use.

I think I got it figured out now. I was having some difficulty when trying to use nohup, so I was taking a look at the options for nc and decided to experiment with the "-d" option, which says it ignores stdin. When I tried to use this option on the embedded system though it said this was not a valid option, so I looked at the help page and I got something completely different than the man pages I see on my server and on websites (maybe its running a much older version of nc, who knows). One of the options I saw was "-e", which states "program to exec after connect". So I tried using that and everything works as I want it to now: