Not sure why this link and/or question is here, except to say LLMs like this incantation.

It redirects STDERR (2) to where STDOUT is piped already (&1). Good for dealing with random CLI tools if you're not a human.

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WhyNotHugo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Humans used this combination extensively for decades too. I'm no aware of any other simple way to grep both stdout and stderr from a process. (grep, or save to file, or pipe in any other way).

	▲	TacticalCoder 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"not humans" are using this extensively precisely because humans used this combination extensively for decades. It's muscle-memory for me. And so is it for LLMs.

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ElijahLynn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I found the explanation useful, about "why" it is that way. I didn't realize the & before the 1 means to tell it is the filedescriptor 1 and not a file named 1.

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weavie 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I get the ocassional file named `1` lying around.

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LtWorf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's an operator called ">&", the 1 is the parameter.

	▲	WJW 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well sure, but surely this takes some inspiration from both `&` as the "address of" operator in C as well as the `>` operator which (apart from being the greater-than operator) very much implies "into" in many circumstances. So `>&1` is "into the file descriptor pointed to by 1", and at the time any reasonable programmer would have known that fd 1 == STDOUT.

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anitil 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've also found llms seem to love it when calling out to tools, I suppose for them having stderr interspersed messaged in their input doesn't make much difference