Re: stdout vs. stderr

[David Kastrup]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:

> Graham Percival writes:
>
>> I think we need to go here.
>
> No.  There will be no progress, warning or error messages to stdout.

stdout is usually line-buffered (like stdin), so progress messages are
not really useful.

The GNU utilities take the distinction between normal output and
diagnostics seriously enough that

ps -b

will output a complete usage info along with an error message to stderr
(because the option is wrong, and the usage info is part of the error
output) while

ps --help

will output the complete usage info to stdout (since it is the regular
output of this option).

-- 
David Kastrup