So I have a bash script that does

#Send standard out to a file.
exec > ${FILENAME}

#...
#do stuff that is dumped to a file.
#...

#Restore standard out to the screen.
exec > /dev/tty

On Linux one would use "exec > /dev/tty" to restore the standard out to the screen but I can't seem to get this to work. Am I doing something wrong?


Jim C.

It works for me, both on OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Solaris SPARC 5.8. Which system are you running on and which bash version?

On the line with "exec > /dev/tty", I get:

line 32: /dev/tty: No such device or address

a grep shows line 32:

32:exec > /dev/tty

perms are:

[user@server ~ 489]$ ls -la /dev/tty; ls -la /devices/pseudo/sy@0:tty
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 26 Jul 30 2008 /dev/tty -> ../devices/pseudo/sy@0:tty
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 22, 0 Aug 24 10:13 /devices/pseudo/sy@0:tty

uname -a reports:

[user@server ~ 490]$ uname -a
SunOS server 5.10 Generic_138888-03 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V245
[user@server ~ 491]$ bash -version
GNU bash, version 3.00.16(1)-release (sparc-sun-solaris2.10)
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
[user@server ~ 492]$

The system specifications are almost the same on my Sun SPARC, except I have older versions:
It works for me even if I redirect the standard output to the allocated pseudo-terminal, that is exec > /dev/pts/1. You can check yours using the tty command. Here's mine:
Hope this helps.

What I get from my script is:

not a tty
not on an active synchronous line

If executed from the command line, I get:

tty -l
/dev/pts/1
not on an active synchronous line

Is there a way that I can save off the file descriptor for standard out and then re-direct to it later?


Jim C.

One thing I forgot to mention. The script in question is called by ssh from another machine.

Bingo! That was the problem. I have to use ssh -t to force a pseudo tty.

Well done!