Little Helpers

There is often a need to debug scripts which are started by daemons, so you have no input/output available. The following snippet easily redirects stdout and stderr to a file:

#!/bin/bash

exec >> /tmp/script_debug.log 2>&1
set -x 

echo Start: $(date)

: buggy code

echo Stop: $(date)

and here the output:

$ cat /tmp/script_debug.log
++ date
+ echo Start: Sat Dec 15 08:37:45 CET 2012
Start: Sat Dec 15 08:37:45 CET 2012
+ your-buggy-cmd
foo: line 8: your-buggy-cmd: command not found
++ date
+ echo Stop: Sat Dec 15 08:37:45 CET 2012
Stop: Sat Dec 15 08:37:45 CET 2012