Why is this command not capturing the STDOUT?

Question

I have an executable used for running Valve dedicated game servers. When it runs, it logs its status to the terminal. I want to capture this output in a file while also seeing it.

./srcds_linux -game tf +map cp_dustbowl -maxplayers 24 | tee -a mylogfile.txt

The executable runs just fine, and my terminal is populated with the server logs in real time, but when I kill the server, mylogfile.txt is empty. Is it possible that I can see the logs from the executable but that it's not actually logging to STDOUT? I'm relatively new to bash/linux scripting. I am not trying to capture STDERR, although it does at least print some of the logs I'm seeing in my terminal to mylogfile.txt, but not nearly all of them.

Answer 1

Another option to handle the Source Dedicated Server on Linux and to capture all of its output is to run it in a docker container, maybe using the existing image from https://github.com/Hackebein/docker-srcds .

If you use their run command but omit the -ti options, the container will attach both STDOUT and STDERR but will not attach STDIN and will not allocate a terminal - forcing the executable to output all of its stuff to the standard stream, that you can then capture.

Running in a container also allows you a lot more control, such as instructing the container to log to files or syslog.