Actually, Linux manual says: DESCRIPTION Under normal circumstances every UNIX program has three streams opened for it when it starts up, one for inpu

Actually, Linux manual says: DESCRIPTION Under normal circumstances every UNIX program has three streams opened for it when it starts up, one for input, one for output, and one for printing diagnostic or error messages. These are typically attached to the user's terminal (see tty(4)) but might instead refer to files or other devices, depending on what the parent process chose to set up. (See also the "Redirection" section of sh(1).) The input stream is referred to as "standard input"; the output stream is referred to as "standard output"; and the error stream is referred to as "standard error". These terms are abbreviated to form the symbols used to refer to these files, namely stdin, stdout, and stderr.