Gabriel, thank you for clarifying the source of this behavior. Still, I'm surprised it would be hard-coded into Python. Consider an interactive program, that asks the user several questions, and displays paragraphs of information based on those questions. The paragraphs are output using print, and the questions are asked via raw_input. You want to do some simple debugging of the program by printing some debugging statements via 'print >>sys.stderr', and you don't want the debug output mixed in with the normal output on the screen, so you try to route the debugging output to a file by adding '2>filename' to the end of the command line.
Unfortunately, you will no longer see any of the questions being printed via raw_input. The rest of the output will be fine, but the questions disappear. Your program just stops, without asking anything... you have to guess what should be there. I'm surprised that Python hard-codes this behavior without giving the programmer any way to change it. It leaves me with two options: to either always use the logging module for debugging messages (which is not odious at all, it's just that the code in question predates the logging module, which is why debugging was done as it is), or change the program so that raw_input is never used with a prompt parameter; the prompt must always be printed separately. <shrug> At least I now know I'm not crazy... regarding this, anyway. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
