Do we need auxin and auxout? (was: Should fd 3 be /dev/tty?)

[Snoopy]

In article <30752 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at 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'.

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