PIPING in CMD.EXE

So, I'm trying something simple: redirect the output of a command to a file.  For no obvious reason, the utility decided that some of the data was 'stdout' and the rest was 'stderr'.  So all I need to do is the 2>&1 redirect trick, right?

Right.  But it's much stranger than that.

cvs annotate >data.dat 2>&1

is the correct command.  The wrong command is 

cvs annotate 2>&1 >data.dat

See the very subtle difference?  I sure didn't.  Because it didn't work right away, I had to start debugging it -- was it really putting output into those two pipes? (yes).  Can I pipe them each, one at a time? (yes)  Can I google for the correct syntax (yes).  Nowhere did I see the warning: you must do the 2>&1 pipe AFTER the >data.dat redirect.

Interestingly, if you first redirect output 1 (stdout), then pipe output 2 (stderr) into 1, then redirect output 1 to a diferent file, output 2 goes to the console.  I'd expect it to go into one of the two files that 1 was redirected to.  And output 1 eventually goes to the last file it was directed to.

ObLink: Microsoft badly documents the pipe operators at:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490982.aspx