I was reminded of this by seeing it in a shell script recently: theorder that you do redirection in on a command line can be important.This means that the following two lines are not equivalent:

foobar 2>&1 >/some/wherefoobar >/some/where 2>&1

The first one sends standard error to wherever the current standardoutput is, and then sends standard output to /some/where ; the lattersends both standard output and standard error to /some/where .

I was bitten by this today, so I am going to grump about it.Today's irritation with the Bourne shell is that the followingis illegal syntax:

echo hi &;

This probably looks peculiar and silly, so let me give a real examplethat is also illegal:

for i in *watch; do nohup ./$i >/dev/null 2>&1

So is ' ; ; ', and for the same reason: in the Bourne