STDOUT? STDERR?

[Christian Biere]

Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
> i noticed that gpg can send output to the terminal, apparently bypassing 
> STDOUT and STDERR...

I don't know where the upper-case comes from, in C it's stdin and stdout
which are both of type 'FILE *' and kind of special.

> i would expect this command to not send any output to the terminal:
> 	$ date | gpg -ear {untrusted_key} > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
 
> but it sends quite a bit of information to the terminal...?

Yes, to the TTY - if the shell is attached to one. See --batch and
--no-tty to suppress this.

> how is that done?

By using /dev/tty.

> why is it done that way?

Because /dev/stdin is already used as the input. The decision shouldn't
be up to the input data.

-- 
Christian
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