understand a sequence of redirections

If several redirections are used together, does changing their order make difference?

How shall one understand the meaning of their order? Is the chained channel of redirections built as reading the redirections from left to right, or from right to left?

For example

command 2>&1 > somefile

command > somefile 2>&1

Thanks and regards!

Answers:

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Method 1

Yes, the order makes a difference, and they should be read left to right.

command 2>&1 >somefile means to redirect stderr (2) to the current destination of stdout (the terminal). Then change stdout to go to somefile. So stderr goes to the terminal, and stdout goes to a file.

command >somefile 2>&1 means to redirect stdout to somefile, and then to redirect stderr to the same destination as stdout (the file). So both stderr and stdout go to somefile.

This is explained in section 3.6 of the Bash manual: Redirections.

Method 2

man bash

says:

REDIRECTION
Before a command is executed, its input and output may be redirected
using a special notation interpreted
by the shell. Redi‐
rection may also be used to open and close files for the current
shell execution environment. The
following redirection opera‐
tors may precede or appear anywhere within a simple command or
may follow a command. Redirections
are processed in the order
they appear, from left to right.

and

Note that the order of redirections is significant. For example, the command

ls > dirlist 2>&1

directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command

ls 2>&1 > dirlist

directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated from the standard output before the
standard output was redirected to dirlist.

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