Re: Re: CLI script & exec() - how to control what gets dumped on the screen.

Edward Kay wrote: >> my fault was indeed thinking along such 'the result' lines - I did >> not consider that stderr was not part of 'the result' and that most >> programs seem to happily spit out their output to stderr (e.g. apache2ctl, >> cvs, mysql to name a few that I was calling in the problem script) and yes >> I'm still rather baffled as to why something like apache2ctl would >> dump the string 'Syntax OK' to stderr - if ever there was some >> user feedback >> that *didn't* represent an error it would be 'Syntax OK'. >> > > I agree that this may seem a bit strange at first. My understanding however, > is that stderr is used for errors and diagnostic info; stdout is used for > output to be seen by a user. > > The confusion seems to arise from the fact that when using the *nix command > line, stderr and stdout are almost always both set as the terminal window. ah - good explanation, thanks! > > I think it would be helpful if the manual page for exec said that on *nix, > it only captures stdout (although this is mentioned in the corresponding > user comments). > > Edward >