Pipe Apropos to Newfile

Pl3th0r4x · 02-06-2012, 01:54 PM

K, I am stuck on my teachers 2nd question. I have 10 tabs open and none of them are helping get the answer.

He wants me to run the command

$ apropos calendar

here is the output

Code:

Curses::Widgets::Calendar (3pm) - Calendar Widgets
cal (1)              - displays a calendar and the date of Easter
calendar (1)         - reminder service
Date::Calc (3pm)     - Gregorian calendar date calculations
Date::Calendar (3pm) - Calendar objects for different holiday schemes
Date::Calendar::Profiles (3pm) - Some sample profiles for Date::Calendar and Date::Calendar::Year
Date::Calendar::Year (3pm) - Implements embedded "year" objects for Date::Calendar
evolution (1)        - groupware suite for GNOME containing e-mail, calendar, addressbook, to-do ...
ncal (1)             - displays a calendar and the date of Easter

He then wants me to put this output into a newfile

I created the newfile folder, but every command I have tried is just renaming the folder and not actually putting the contents of calendar into the newfile.

I am using

cat
ls
touch
mv

but none of these are actually taking the output of calendar and inputting them into newfile.

He wants us to use the info and man pages to figure out to do it, but they aren't helping, or I do not see where the answer is. Can anyone give me better direction before I just email him?

TobiSGD · 02-06-2012, 02:09 PM

If you want to put the output of a command into a file you have to use redirection.

Pl3th0r4x · 02-06-2012, 02:14 PM

Yeah, thats actually in the question:

Quote:

Use the apropos command to get a list of utilities related to "calendar" (as a keyword) and redirect the output to another file. Make a note of the file name. What was the command?

What I dont know is how. Do you mean with a ">" character? Such as cat calendar > newfile

or replace cat with mv, cp, touch, etc? Because those arent working and I literally have about 9 tabs open and I cant seem to get it.

TobiSGD · 02-06-2012, 02:23 PM

You want to redirect the output of the command

Code:

apropros calendar

to a file, so why would you try redirect the output of a cat, mv, cp, touch, ... command?
Here seems to be a misunderstanding. To create a new file (the file doesn't have to exist for a redirection) and put the content of stdout into it all you need is the >-sign.
For example:

Code:

ls > test

will launch the command ls (which prints it output to stdout) and then redirect stdout to a file called test. This file is created if it doesn't exist, otherwise it will be overwritten. No cat, mv, touch, ... involved.