standard I/O streams

[jcdenton1995]

Hello all,

I'm a little confused by the concept of stdin, stdout, stderr and their file descriptors.

On the whole I understand but what I can't work out is this; if each process gets three streams when it's initialised, and by default they point to the controlling terminal, how is it that they are able to be represented by the file descriptors 0, 1 and 2?

I would think each stream for each individual process would need it's own file descriptor because they could connect to different terminals?

Are stdin, out and err basically three streams that are shared by multiple processes?

I hope that makes sense

[The Cog]

I found this - hope it helps. The file descriptor is local to a process, and somewhere, there is a lookup from the process's descriptor to the real file structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_descriptor

[HermanAB]

You can change the file descriptors - it doesn't have to be 0, 1 and 2. By doing that, you can do quite complex things with IO streams.

You can change the descriptors with the exec command for example.

See this: https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/...ction_tutorial

and maybe see serial port redirection described here:
https://www.aeronetworks.ca/2015/10/...om-serial.html

[jcdenton1995]

You can change the file descriptors - it doesn't have to be 0, 1 and 2. By doing that, you can do quite complex things with IO streams.

You can change the descriptors with the exec command for example.

See this: https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/...ction_tutorial

and maybe see serial port redirection described here:
https://www.aeronetworks.ca/2015/10/...om-serial.html

I found this - hope it helps. The file descriptor is local to a process, and somewhere, there is a lookup from the process's descriptor to the real file structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_descriptor

Thanks to you both! what I now understand is that the terms stdin, stdout and stderr refer to the data streams themselves, and not the source / destination of those streams. All programs get three streams by default and because everything is handled like a file, each stream gets it's own file descriptor on a per process basis. 0 = stdin, 1 = stdout and 2= stderr. Your first link HermanAB probably does the best job of explaining it that I've seen anywhere on the web.

Thanks again to you both!