Copy stderr of previous command without rerunning it

Question

(I am using the kitty terminal emulator, though I would appreciate answers for other terminal emulators as well.)

I run a command, and get some error message, like this:

~ » somecommand
❌️ Some Error Message  # from stderr

Obviously, to copy the stderr of the command, I can do somecommand 2>&1 >/dev/null | wl-copy ^{(or xclip)}
But I usually forget to do that, and I don't want to re-run the command, and I never remember the syntax for piping stderr so I have to context-switch anyway to look it up.

Is there a simple command I can alias in my .zshrc, or a keyboard shortcut I can configure, to copy the stderr of the previous run command in the terminal emulator?

Eugene Sh. · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-24 16:18:58Z

-1

This is something that works in bash, not sure about other shells.
You can redirect your stderr globally into tee which will "split" it writing it both to a file and the terminal:

$ exec 2> >(tee ~/tmp/error.log)

(can add this command to you .bashrc or similar).
However, the caveat is that the shell prompt and command echo in bash are written to stderr, so you are going to see a lot of noise in the log file (including escape codes for colors and such).

answered Oct 24 at 16:18

Eugene Sh.

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