In a Unix shell, if I want to combine stderr and stdout into the stdout stream for further manipulation, I can append the following on the end of my command:

2>&1

So, if I want to use head on the output from g++, I can do something like this:

g++ lots_of_errors 2>&1 | head

so I can see only the first few errors.

I always have trouble remembering this, and I constantly have to go look it up, and it is mainly because I don't fully understand the syntax of this particular trick.

Can someone break this up and explain character by character what 2>&1 means?