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I was bitten by this recentishly and I had to learn the difference between file descriptors and descriptions. I had a program that was misbehaving when talking

I was bitten by this recentishly and I had to learn the difference between file descriptors and descriptions. I had a program that was misbehaving when talking to a tty, but not when the output was piped through cat. Turns the program would set O_NONBLOCK (a description level property) on its input, but of course the shell was dup'ing the input tty fd to output as well, implicitly making the output non-blocking as well. Setting the output to a different description (i.e. the pipe) would workaround that.

392 3y ago
For a long time `npm` would do that to your stdout/in, which didn't impact anything in interactive shells because your shell resets it every time it shows the prompt, but run those same commands in a bash script and later processes will crash with strange error messages because no one has ever tested with stdout being nonblocking. So much for separate processes being independent.
deleted 3y ago
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