it appears that the output grom qpkg is not pipeable. This is very incnvenient when one wants to use it to check a full system. The following does for example not yield any content to the file temp.log: qpkg -c -nc > temp.log And the following renders nothing to the screen: qpkg -c | less
qpkg is outputting to stderr, not stdout. To capture it's output, do: qpkg -c -nc 2>&1 >temp.log or qpkg -c 2>&1 | less
Oh, sorry. Seems there was just a bit of cacheing done. My bad.