perusing o'reilly's "bash pocket reference" for all of the little
bash tips and tricks i'd never heard of, and ran across this WRT file
descriptors; apparently, bash supports assignment of a new file
descriptor to a named variable, while giving that new fd the next
available open fd number from 10 and up.
example:
$ echo foo {foofd}> /tmp/foo.out
foo
$
what the above apparently does is that it still echoes "foo" to
stdout, but as a side effect, it opens a new file descriptor (in this
case, 10), i guess associated with the output file /tmp/foo.out.
there's nothing *in* /tmp/foo.out, but i can see the new fd value:
$ echo ${foofd}
10
$
at this point, it seems i can write into the output file /tmp/foo.out
with:
$ echo test1 >&10
$ cat /tmp/foo.out
test1
$
but it would make more sense to be able to use the named fd, would it
not? however, it doesn't appear i can do this:
$ echo test2 >&{foofd}
$ cat /tmp/foo.out
test1
$
so there was no error, but that seemed to have no effect. however,
if i treat it as a variable (which i suspect i'm supposed to):
$ echo test2 >&${foofd}
$ cat /tmp/foo.out
test1
test2
$
it *appends* to the file, which is not what i was expecting.
can anyone clarify the proper use of this construct, and
particularly if they use it on a regular basis for something useful?
rday
--
========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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