coopster - 2:48 pm on Jun 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

I use the first example myself but came across the second recently and was trying to wrap my head around the why of it all because it looked like the same thing to me.

Now I get it. It took a few reads to let it sink in but it makes sense. The independent file descriptors and left to right assignment is what I misunderstood. I viewed the redirection as a progressive assignment, passing each on to the next in progressive order as opposed to independent assignment from left to right order.

Makes sense. Thanks!

One follow-up question, or confirmation perhaps; would the following entries produce the same expected redirection?

example1: crontab task details here ... >/dev/null 
example2: crontab task details here ... 2>&1 > /dev/null