linux redirectors not logging errors, does linux have equivalent to windows 2>&1

Question

I run the following file with the >log.log redirector and it does not capture errors.

#!/bin/bash

echo ************************BEGIN LOG******************************
date +"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S $HOSTNAME"
cp -f /scripts/original/clamscans.log /scripts
find /public/public/clamscans/. -exec grep -n FOUND /dev/null {} \;>>clamscans.log
mail somedude@someplace.com < clamscans.log
tar cvf dailyresults.tar /public/public/clamscans/*.txt
gzip -f dailyresults.tar
mv -f /public/public/clamscans/*.txt /scripts/lastnite
echo end log entry

The following errors show up when I run from the file from the term window, but are not written to log.log:

tar: /public/public/clamscans/*.txt: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
mv: cannot stat `/public/public/clamscans/*.txt': No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong? I know with windows you can add the 2>&1 to capture error data. Is there such a thing for Linux?

Answer 1

File descriptor 1 is stdout, 2 is stderr. This applies to both Linux and Windows. With ">logfile", you're redirecting stdout to the file "logfile", but what you actually want is to redirect stderr. That can be done with "2>filename" or "2>&1" (in combination with ">logfile") on both Windows and Linux, but note that the order might be significant, so it should be "command >logfile 2>&1" and not the other way round.

Answer 2

You can redirect standard error to a file like this:

mycommand 2> error.log

and you can use the following syntax to redirect both standard output and standard error to a file:

mycommand &> file

or

mycommand > file-name 2>&1