As you probably konw, you can capture any output (including stderr) to a file. The best way I can think of for seeing it also, is to tail the capture file. Like this find . -name "biff*" > output.txt 2>&1 the ">" is the redirection operator, telling bash (or whatever) to redirect to output.txt, then the "2>&1" tells bash (or whatever) to redirect stderr to stdout. That way, you get everything in the output.txt file. To be able to see the stuff as it is written to the file, call the command (on different shell, or in foreground (use different shell if you don't yet understand foreground and background jobs)) tail -f output.txt tail is like less or more, accept that it shows the end of the file. Then the -f switch tells it to stay active and spit out to the screen anything it sees added to the file. If the starting output is important to see, then you'll want to run the tail command before the command you want to capture output from, but you will need a file to exist for the tail command. You can create one very easy with the same ">" redirect operator, like this echo "This is the beginning of the file" > output.txt so now you have a file you can [tail -f]. as a side note, the ">>" operator appends the file rather than replace the contents. ">" by itself will zero out the file before it start outputting to it. ~~~ Wow! Yes, this helps a lot. Thank you for the detailed explanation. ~James