Talk:Standard streams

Inconsistency

"stdin", "stdout" and "stderr" are "channels", "file handles" or "ports". They are not "streams". Calling them "streams" is inconsistent with the definition of Stream (computing): "a sequence of data elements made available over time"

When you "write data to stdout", the "stream" is *your data*, not "stdout". Std-out is just a standardized file handle number. The best analogy is a "channel". "stdout" is *where* you write the *stream* (your data).

Also here Redirection (computing) it reads: *"Redirecting to and from the standard file handles"*. What is "standard" in std-in and std-out is that input stream is read from file handle 0 and output stream is sent to file handle 1. "stdin" is a file handle, and the "input stream" is the data you receive by reading from stdin.

"stream" is data, while a "channel" is a medium. "stdin" and "stdout", from a programming point of view, are channels, mediums.

In the sentence "write data to stdout". *data* is the *stream* and "stdout" is the *channel*.

You cannot "write data to a stream", the data *is* the stream.

I believe this article should be called "Standard channels" or "Standard file handles", and also the text should be revised to avoid conflating "stream" with "channel".

Moreover, this article starts:

> "In computer programming, standard streams are preconnected input and output streams (communication channels)"

implying that a "stream" is a "communication channel" -which is not- by definition from this same encyclopedia: Stream (computing)

By replacing "stream" with "channel" in the text of the article, the inconsistencies are resolved.e.g.:

> "In computer programming, standard channels are preconnected input and output channels"

Stdin to display status?

The GUIs section states that the dwm tiling window manager "uses its stdin to display status information". Is this correct? Surely stdout or stderr is intended. Nate (talk) 16:10, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

stdpasswd

Has anybody heard of stdpasswd used as a standardized stream anywhere? kostmo (talk) 04:21, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

C# Example

Monkeycoders on teh my wikipedia. Fixed for great coding style —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.92.205.25 (talk) 08:06, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

FILENO

What does FILENO stand for? Thanks, --Abdull (talk) 11:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it means file number. It's a very short name because of the limitations of 1970s era C compilers which typically ignored anything passed about 7 or 8 characters in an identifier. —EncMstr (talk) 17:11, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Affected by proposed renaming

Presently standard error (presently disambiguation) and standard error stream are pointed to or redirect to this article. There is a formal proposed renaming/move at Talk:Standard error (statistics)#Requested move that would affect these routes to this article. Unfortunately, this discussion is only open for 7 days, so be quick if you want your opinion to count. Melcombe (talk) 19:30, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Encoding inconsistency

I read Popular Windows programs that open a separate console window in addition to their GUI windows are the emulators pSX and DOSBox.

Nonethess, from my undesrstanding, Windows application run with text encoded in UTF-16, UTF-8, or windows-1252; when DOS box is configured for CP850. This mean that they cannot display the same set of character, and so their interoperability is limited, and cannot be used neither easily, nor by default which is opposite to the unix philosophy described in background section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.75.160.141 (talk) 12:18, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

PHP

idk if it should go in the article, but in PHP, its php://stdin , php://stdout , php://stderr since 2002 / PHP 4.3.0 Divinity76 (talk) 15:41, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Origin of stderr

“ Standard error was added to Unix after several wasted phototypesetting runs ended with error messages being typeset instead of displayed on the user's terminal. [citation]Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter ”

While a bit unusual, I don't see why the material about the origin of stderr was removed. Yes, it's a self-published primary source, but the author can certainly be considered an expert, and I don't see anything in WP:V that prohibits this unless you think it's somehow controversial, which it's not as far as I know. Your comment about v6 makes no sense to me; Johnson doesn't say, but this would have been about 1973, and v6 wasn't released until 1975. Do you doubt this actually happened, or are you just unhappy with the source? Kendall-K1 (talk) 22:14, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I am unhappy about several aspects:

1. the source: I am not familiar with sjc @ yaccman. Is that a reliable source? Certainly the newsgroup is not fact checked.
2. the assertion: While the story seems like it could be plausible, it doesn't need to be. Unix borrowed much from Multics which had stderr. Why would they not have added that with stdout?
3. the lack of dates: If the event occurred in 1973, then that could fit. But nothing here gives dates.

While I would like to see any tidbit on the origin of these, the prime policy of verifiability being observed would help this lore be defended and greatly improve the article. —EncMstr (talk) 04:42, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Bell Labs installed their CAT in 1973, and this would have been soon after that. S. C. Johnson worked there at the time. He was co-author with Kernighan of "THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE B" and several other CSTRs [1]. Unix did borrow a lot from Multics, but what really distinguished Unix was the vast amount of Multics stuff they deliberately left out. While the mailing list (not newsgroup) is not fact checked, I have no doubt this was actually written by scj. You could argue that his memory could be faulty. But this entire article is almost completely unsourced, so picking on one tidbit that actually is sourced seems odd to me. Kendall-K1 (talk) 11:48, 20 December 2013 (UTC)