On Debian (and most Unix-like systems), you can overwrite stdout with stderr by redirecting stderr to stdout. Here are the common ways to do it:

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1. Redirect stderr to stdout

Use 2>&1 to redirect stderr (file descriptor 2) to stdout (file descriptor 1):

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command 2>&1

• This sends both stdout and stderr to the terminal.

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2. Overwrite stdout with stderr only

If you want to discard stdout and only show stderr, use:

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command 2>&1 >/dev/null

• 2>&1 redirects stderr to stdout.
• >/dev/null discards stdout (and thus stderr, since it was redirected to stdout).

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3. Swap stdout and stderr

If you want to swap stdout and stderr (so stderr goes to stdout and stdout goes to stderr), use:

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command 3>&2 2>&1 1>&3 | command2

• This is more advanced and rarely needed.

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4. Save stderr to a file and overwrite stdout

If you want to save stderr to a file and overwrite stdout with it:

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command 2> error.log
cat error.log >&1

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