From 9a5788a5faf5699da9cb85d5294b8696b0e0e4f0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Markus Ressel <mail@markusressel.de>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2022 04:11:01 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] added section about logging to file

---
 README.md | 18 +++++++++++++++---
 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index b7b8113..6c7f2e2 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ Dependencies:
 
 You can print a help message by running the script without any parameters:
 
-```
+```shell
 ./zfs-inplace-rebalancing.sh
 ```
 
@@ -102,17 +102,29 @@ You can print a help message by running the script without any parameters:
 Make sure to run this script with a user that has rw permission to all of the files in the target directory.
 The easiest way to achieve this is by **running the script as root**.
 
-```
+```shell
 sudo su
 ./zfs-inplace-rebalancing.sh --checksum true --passes 1 /pool/path/to/rebalance
 ```
 
 To keep track of the balancing progress, you can open another terminal and run:
 
-```
+```shell
 watch zpool list -v
 ```
 
+### Log to File
+
+To write the output to a file, simply redirect stdout and stderr to a file (or separate files).
+Since this redirects all output, you will have to follow the contents of the log files to get realtime info:
+
+```shell
+# one shell window:
+tail -F ./stdout.log
+# another shell window:
+./zfs-inplace-rebalancing.sh /pool/path/to/rebalance >> ./stdout.log 2>> ./stderr.log
+```
+
 ### Things to consider
 
 Although this script **does** have a progress output (files as well as percentage) it might be a good idea to try a small subfolder first, or process your pool folder layout in manually selected badges. This can also limit the damage done, if anything bad happens.