How can a process intercept stdout and stderr of another process on Linux?

Since I'm not allowed to edit Jauco's answer, I'll give the full answer that worked for me (Russell's page relies on un-guaranteed behaviour that, if you close file descriptor 1 for STDOUT, the next creat call will open FD 1.

So, run a simple endless script like this:

import time

while True:
    print 'test'
    time.sleep(1)

Save it to test.py, run with

$ python test.py

Get the PID:

$ ps auxw | grep test.py

Now, attach gdb:

$ gdb -p (pid)

and do the fd magic:

(gdb) call creat("/tmp/stdout", 0600)
$1 = 3
(gdb) call dup2(3, 1)
$2 = 1

Now you can tail /tmp/stdout and see the output that used to go to STDOUT.

There's several new utilities that wrap up the "gdb method" and add some extra touches. The one I use now is called "reptyr" ("Re-PTY-er"). In addition to grabbing STDERR/STDOUT, it will actually change the controlling terminal of a process (even if it wasn't previously attached to a terminal).

The best use of this is to start up a screen session, and use it to reattach a running process to the terminal within screen so you can safely detach from it and come back later.

It's packaged on popular distros (Ex: 'apt-get install reptyr').

http://onethingwell.org/post/2924103615/reptyr