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  • I'd rather say that "most commands have either single or double output channel - stdout (fd 1) and very often stderr (fd 2)". Commented Aug 17, 2011 at 15:15
  • Also, could you by the way explain why you use while IFS= read -r line;? The way I see it, IFS has no effect here since you assign value to only one variable (line). See this question. Commented Aug 17, 2011 at 15:33
  • @rozcietrzewiacz I've made a mention of stderr, and see the first part of my answer for why IFS makes a difference even if you're reading a into single variable (it's to retain the leading whitespace). Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 1:26
  • Couldn't you do the same with sed -ne 'w odd.txt' -e 'n;w even.txt'? Commented Nov 23, 2017 at 0:07
  • 4
    @Wildcard You could do the same with other tools, sure. But the goal of this answer was to illustrate redirections in the shell. Commented Nov 23, 2017 at 12:12