[TUHS] Why does shell write to stderr?

[Rob Pike]

If you never ring the bell in the editor, the issue never comes up, the
code is simpler, and there's less to understand.

-rob


On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 8:33 AM George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:

> I also had extreme WTF the first time I looked in code and saw an
> isatty() guard over some activity.
>
> "this program processes stdin to stdout, except.. if I decide
> otherwise" never appeared in man pages.
>
> But that said, it sort of made sense. Why ring bell in an editor, if
> you know the input pipe side can't hear it? A tty is a rather strange
> device being the join over stdout, stdin and stderr, and there is a
> (tiny?) set of things which need to know.
>
> more for instance, probably needs to know that waiting for a command
> to move pagination onward if there is no controlling terminal is not
> sensible. If you want your input in chunks, more is not the way to do
> it.
>
> I hate special cases. This is why people say english is so hard to
> learn but really all languages have them, its just that english having
> stolen words from everywhere has more instances of isatty() than
> others.
>
> -G
>
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