On 08/12/2010 06:46 AM, Tom Brown wrote:
alas the thing that generates the output creates 5 or 6 seperate streams in sequence that generate 5 or 6 log files but i dont know in advance the names of these logs.
If "the thing" is generating log files, then it's not using "standard out". Perhaps you are using that term incorrectly.
On a unix-like system, each process has three standard file descriptors when it starts: these are standard output (stdout), standard error (stderr), and standard input (stdin). These three files are inherited from the parent process, which means that your shell normally sets them up for the commands that you run. If you do not redirect any of those three, then they will normally be connected to the controlling terminal (/dev/tty is the controlling terminal for any process). You can use the shell's redirection functions to connect those file descriptors to files rather than to the terminal, or pipe them to another command.
If your application is writing its data to a file without your specific redirection, then it's not using stdout and you can not pipe it to another system without writing the data to disk.