How to stop redirection via exec
I want to redirect some output of a script to a file.
REDIRECT_FILE="foo.txt"
echo to console
# starting redirect
exec > $REDIRECT_FILE
echo to file
echo ...
echo ...
# stop redirect
exec >&-
echo end of script
"end of script" should be written to stdout.
But instead there is a "Bad file descriptor" error message.
exec 1>&- does not work too.
What is the correct term to stop the redirection?
The exec 1>&- closes stdout. It doesn’t revert it to the original value because you’d already replaced that with exec > $REDIRECT_FILE (which should be exec > "$REDIRECT_FILE" to protect the variable’s value from any further processing by by the shell).
To revert stdout to its original value you need to save it
exec 3>&1 # Save stdout as FD 3
exec 1>"$REDIRECT_FILE" # Redirect stdout to a file
…
exec 1>&3 # Revert stdout to its original value