alt Hacker NewsIt's a reminder of how archaic the systems we use are.
File descriptors are like handing pointers to the users of your software. At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.
And sh/bash's syntax is so weird because the programmer at the time thought it was convenient to do it like that. Nobody ever asked a user.
Replies
> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.
You can for the destination. That's the whole reason you need the "&": to tell the shell the destination is not a named file (which itself could be a pipe or socket). And by default you don't need to specify the source fd at all. The intent is that stdout is piped along but stderr goes directly to your tty. That's one reason they are separate.
And for those saying "<" would have been better: that is used to read from the RHS and feed it as input to the LHS so it was taken.
I've long wanted easy, trivial multichannel i/o with duplication
I want to be able to route x independent input and y independent output trivially from the terminal
Proper i/o routing
It shouldn't be hard, it shouldn't be unsolved, and it shouldn't be esoteric
It should be a lesson to learn on how simple, logical and reliable tools can last decades.
I quite like how archaic it is. I am turned off by a lot of modern stuff. My shell is nice and predictable. My scripts from 15 years ago still work just fine. No, I don't want it to get all fancy, thanks.
You can do:
2>/dev/stdout
And of course I wish you could use a friendlier name for STDERR instead of `2>`
The conveniences also mean that there is more than ~one~ ~two~ several ways to do something.
Which means that reading someone else's shell script (or awk, or perl, or regex) is INCREDIBLY inconvenient.
They're more like capabilities or handles than pointers. There's a reason in Rust land many systems use handles (indices to a table of objects) in absence of pointer arithmetic.
In the C API of course there's symbolic names for these. STDIN_FILENO, STDOUT_FILENO, etc for the defaults and variables for the dynamically assigned ones.
> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.
You can use /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr in most cases, but it's not perfect.
Who do you imagine the users were back when it was being developed?
> bash's syntax is so weird
What should be the syntax according to contemporary IT people? JSON? YAML? Or just LLM prompt?
The programmers were the users. They asked. They said it was ok.
Wait until you find out where "tty" comes from!
At the time, the users were the programmers.