I know quite a few places where shell scripts would probably blow up if some arbitrary FD number >2 would be used... Opening a file in bash (and I suppose other

I know quite a few places where shell scripts would probably blow up if some arbitrary FD number >2 would be used... Opening a file in bash (and I suppose other shells too) is done by specifying the FD number explicitly: exec 3<> somefile.txt That might trigger some very weird behaviour when piping data from a 'stddata' aware tool into shell scripts - something which is guaranteed to happen somewhere.