

The Birth of Standard Error - aminkh
http://spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/

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agf
Did anyone else think this was going to be about
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error)
from statistics? I just think of the computing term as 'stderr'.

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doorhammer
Yeah. I did. It made sense when I saw the article, but I was confused for a
second.

~~~
D9u
Being an avid "nixer" I immediately thought of the following:

[http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp?topic=...](http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.zos.r12.bpxa400%2Fstd.htm)

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avmich
So, did stderr outlive its purpose?

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cpeterso
A disadvantage of separate stdout and stderr streams is matching of errors to
the corresponding resulting output.

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jewel
When this is important, you can make it so that stdout and stderr are the same
stream, via a variety of methods. With bash this is done with 2>&1, as in:

command 2>&1

~~~
bazzargh
While that makes them the same stream, it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Many systems will write to stdout buffered, but stderr unbuffered, so that
writes are visible when the program crashes. Redirecting streams at the shell
level doesn't stop application level buffering ruining your day.

Having said that, GP's request is pretty niche, it's only useful when the
program uses stdout (not a gui, web etc) and is doing work that might write to
stderr while it's writing to stdout (so no summary report generators, long
running physics simulations etc)

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yuhong
I wonder why snprintf did not make it into C89 given the Morris worm.

