Over the years, a number of people have reported that commands such as Plex Media Scanner output only to the tty, and not to stdout - I found three reports, but am only able to link two; the third is from 2018 and entitled “Exporting Content Files”:
- [2017] Plex Media Scanner won’t redirect output in version 1.5 and above
- [2019] Can’t redirect Plex Media Scanner’s output
This breaks piping in commands such as the following:
$ Plex Media Scanner --list | grep Movies
This breaks most scripting anyone would want to do with Plex (e.g. capturing a section ID based on a user-friendly library name).
The issue I would like to highlight is that this also appears to break command output in docker. E.g., the following commands return no output, although the command appears to execute:
$ docker exec plex sh -c "/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner"
$ docker exec plex sh -c "/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --help"
$ docker exec plex sh -c "/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --list"
To test my quoting (lmao) I created a link from /bin/ls to /bin/L S, and did the following, which does produce the expected output:
$ docker exec plex sh -c "/bin/L\ S -l"
Based on the previous reports, I believe this bug also applies to the Mac server.
