[reacweb]

make 2>&1 | tee m.log is in my muscle memory, like adding a & at the end of a command to launch a job, or ctrl+z bg when I forget it, or tar cfz (without the minus so that the order is not important). Without this terseness, people would build myriads of personal alias.

This redirection relies on foundational concepts (file descriptors, stdin 0, stdout 1, stderr 2) that need to be well understood when using unix. IMO, this helps to build insight and intuitiveness. A pipe is not magic, it is just a simple operation on file descriptors. Complexity exists (buffering, zombies), but not there.

[cpach]

Are you sure you understood the comment you replied to?

I agree that 2>&1 is not complex. But I think I speak for many Bash users when I say that this idiom looks bad, is hard to Google, hard to read and hard to memorize.

[skywhopper]

It’s not like someone woke up one morning and decided to design a confusing language full of shortcuts to make your life harder. Bash is the sum of decades of decisions made, some with poor planning, many contradictory, by hundreds of individuals working all over the world in different decades, to add features to solve and work around real world problems, keep backwards compatibility with decades of working programs, and attempt to have a shared glue language usable across many platforms. Most of the special syntax was developed long before Google existed.

So, sure, there are practical issues with details like this. And yet, it is simple. And there are simple methods for learning and retaining little tidbits like this over time if you care to do so. Bash and its cousins aren’t going away, so take notes, make a cheat sheet, or work on a better replacement (you’ll fail and make the problem worse, but go ahead).