[TUHS] Why does shell write to stderr?

[John Cowan]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 7:53 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

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

Well, yes.  And by the same token, you can eliminate the complexities of
i18n by having only one diagnostic, namely "?" (or by pretending all the
world is anglophone).

But setting aside for the moment this style of argumentation, let's
consider directory colorization.  I have no dog in this fight, as I set all
my terminals to black-on-white as God and Gutenberg intended, and set TERM
to vt100 so the colors can't be changed.  However, the feature seems to be
extremely popular, and can't be readily done outboard in a pipeline],
unlike most of the infamous options of cat(1).  As things stand, the X3.64
control sequences output by colorization are *not* suppressed when the
output of ls isn't a terminal, which means I have had to write a stripper
for them.  Another example is cal(1), which tries to output the current day
in reverse video, which is equally annoying but fortunately can be
suppressed more easily by piping it through more(1).
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