On Tue, 14 Dec 1999, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Scott Raney wrote:
> >
> > > I'd suggest you mention "console" somewhere close to stdin
> > > and stdout (maybe give them their own entries) in the
> > > MetaTalk Reference so people looking for "console" will bring
> > > up read/write, too.
> >
> > Except when UNIX people refer to "console", it's almost always as the
> > keyboard and screen physically attached to the computer and never as
> > where a process gets its input and output. So you never want to do
> > anything specific to a "console". This terminology is more commonly
> > (and incorrectly) used on Windows to refer to the character-based
> > input/output from DOS applications.
>
> And under Linux, where "console" is also sometimes used for terminal
> windows. In particular, KDE uses an xterm window called "Konsole".
Hmm. I don't see that anywhere (Red Hat 6.0). Most X11 systems *do*
have some sort of "console" application, but even this is special as
stated above: the "console" application is the place where system
error messages appear and not a normal terminal window. And there is
generally only one of them and you usually don't use it for normal
command-line interaction.
It occured to me that Mac and Windows users might not understand the
above scenario, but a common practice on UNIX is to log into a system
other than the one you're sitting at, and the output of programs you
run on that remote system appear at the one you're sitting at. So
knowing whether someone is logged in over the network or sitting at
the system console is important to debugging any problems they have.
Many systems don't even *have* a console and you can only use them
over the network, including most of the UNIX boxes ISPs use as
WWW/FTP/mail servers.
> Does anyone think that Metacard could benefit from stderr in addition to
> stdin and stdout, or is that just unneccessary work for Scott?
It's already supported ;-)
Scott
> --
> Steven D'Aprano
>
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********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
