Greg Wooledge wrote:
> It's important to note that the following two cases are *not*
> equivalent:
>
> cat "$i" >/dev/stdout
> program -i "$i" -o /dev/stdout
>
> In the first case, the /dev/stdout is part of a redirection. On
> platforms that do not have a native /dev/stdout in the file system,
> Bash handles this *internally* (and it would actually work the way
> you expected).
>
> In the second case, /dev/stdout is just a string as far as Bash is
> concerned. It is passed verbatim to "program" as an argument. There is
> no internal Bash magic happening. You get the underlying operating
> system implementation, or you get "no such file or directory".
That is one of the reasons I don't like the /dev/std{err,in,out}
things. They are not portable. They do different things on different
systems. I avoid them.
Bob
