Gisle Vanem wrote:
> Might-Commander on Windows (MCWin32) supports this as
> well as "/dev/stdin", "/dev/stdout" and "/dev/stderr".
> An idea for Gnulib?
It's an interesting idea.
On one hand:
- Most OSes support /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr, and /dev/fd/N:
Linux, Hurd, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin, Android.
Only AIX and native Windows don't support it.
On the other hand:
- It's not standardized by POSIX [1].
- The number of uses of /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr is 100 times
smaller than that of /dev/null [2].
- It seems the major use of these shorthands is in shell scripts.
It's probably not a useful feature for GNU coreutils, GNU gettext, and
most other packages. Only language runtimes like GNU guile or GNU clisp
would probably profit from it.
- Support for these shorthands is extra code in the 'stat', 'fstatat', 'open',
and 'openat' overrides. But the 'openat' code in Gnulib is so complex
that I would not like to add complexity to it.
Bruno
[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/V1_chap02.html
[2] https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%2Fdev%2Fnull&literal=1
