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

Slashdot has recently started running what it calls 'Backslash'stories, which have (as it puts it):

[...] some of the most interesting comments and exchanges on a handfulof yesterday's Slashdot posts [...]

To me, the most interesting thing about these stories is that they area tacit admission that Slashdot's comment management model is brokenand that a lot of people don't read the comments on Slashdot stories.If most people did regularly read Slashdot comments,