On Tuesday 18 September 2012 15:39:43 Calvin Morrison wrote:
> On 18 September 2012 07:57, leee <leee@...> wrote:
> > On Monday 17 September 2012 17:10:53 Lisi wrote:
> >> I started again.  I installed a fairly basic Squeeze system, I then
> >> installed LXDE (without a hitch), then desktop-base-trinity, also
> >> without a hitch.  I used only the official repository.
> >>
> >> I now had a working system with a terminal in which I could scroll back,
> >> and if I wanted copy in order to paste.
> >>
> >> Next I tried to install kde-trinity.  A long error message ensued.  But
> >> this time I could scroll back to see the whole message.
> >
> > Just an observation:  If you're in a situation where you can only work
> > via the console and can't scroll back to see errors that have scrolled
> > off-screen then either pipe the command through a pager, like less, or
> > re-direct std
>
> for example:
>
> echo "lol" | less
> echo "lol  > output_file
>
> > output & std err to a file.  You can then use less or an editor, like
> > nano, or even copy it to another system to view the entire output and
> > find out what happened.
> >
> > I held off from commenting earlier because I got bounced from
> > trinity-users again (this only became apparent after I'd noticed that I
> > hadn't received any trinity-users posting for about a month or so). 
> > Anyway, as a result I missed the start of this thread and I didn't
> > realise that you hadn't actually been able to see the relevant messages.
> >
> > LeeE
>

...just to add, for those who don't already know...

a simple redirect, as Calvin shows, will only redirect std output but often 
the stuff you need to see is only sent to std error and not to std output.

For example:

~$ cat idontexist > errors.txt

will just produce an empty file because the resulting error message:

"cat: idontexist: No such file or directory"

...is still sent to the terminal via std error.  To include std error in the 
redirect add an '&' to the redirect as below:

~$ cat idontexist &> errors.txt

Unfortunately, it's not possible to pipe stderr on its own but you can 
redirect stderr to stdout and then pipe that e.g.

~$ cat idontexist 2>&1 | less

LeeE