snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy) (05/30/89)
In article <30752@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: |> There is also a need for a standard auxiliary output. stderr is often |> pressed into service for non-error output. I claim that this is a bad |> thing. | I think we're missing the spirit here and getting too literal minded | (ie. that some messages sent to stderr aren't errors, that isn't | exactly why it was called stderr.) Okay, Barry, why *is* it called stderr then? | It would probably be better to just write programs to use some sort of | character tag at the beginning so you could de-mux the different types | of messages at the other end with grep rather than reworking all of | Unix to solve this problem. I think *you* are missing the point. One of the big wins of Unix is that it imposes no structure on data, everything is a stream of bytes. Yes, putting in an 'error' (or whatever) tag is a useful technique at times, (and I have done this myself) but requiring one to be used isn't 'the Unix way'. _____ .-----. /_____\ Snoopy ./ RIP \. /_______\ qiclab!sopwith!snoopy | | |___| parsely!sopwith!snoopy | tekecs | |___| sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy |_________|