You need to pull the old switcheroo on the file descriptors.
Yeah, both Morrie's and Adam's solutions are better than mine -- I guess the tee lets you see the log output streaming by (as well as capturing it to a file). But an idiom I often use is: make &>make.log & tail -f --pid $! make.log which could be adapted to this situation by separately redirecting stdout and stderr as in my last mail. That is, instead of using tee to output and capture the log, capture it to a file by simple redirection, and then use tail to follow that file. (In fact, I'd say 'nice make', but that's a different topic.) -- Smiles, Les. P.S. The only gotcha with my solution is that if you ctrl-C in the terminal, it'll just kill off the tail process, and the make process will keep happily on going. You have to kill the make explicitly with a kill command, or I guess foreground it to ctrl-C it.