Do not close stderr
April 22nd, 2008
A few years ago, I wrote a post commenting on how ugly this was:
$ someprog 2>/dev/null
I was nearly imploring the reader to close stderr:
$ someprog 2>&-
Some very knowledgeable anonymous commenter explained why that was a bad idea. At the time, I didn’t understand exactly what they were saying. As such, I deleted the post. Yesterday, for no particular reason, the implications of closing stderr popped into my head. In the shower no less.
I wrote a simple little C program named do-not-close-stderr.c. It takes two parameters, a string you want written to a file and the file you want said string written to. After opening the file, it prints “some kind of warning message” to stderr. Here we are:
$ gcc -Wall do-not-close-stderr.c -o do-not-close-stderr $ ./do-not-close-stderr "Brock was here." output Some kind of warning message. $ cat output Brock was here.
Now lets close standard error when executing:
$ ./do-not-close-stderr "Brock was here." output 2>&- $ cat output Some kind of warning message. Brock was here.
Thanks to whoever that commenter was.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:44 am
Whoa, it seems like stderr was redirected to stdout since stderr was closed. Is that what happened?
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:22 am
That’s really the case. The reason is that stderr is opened with fd=2 by default, and if you close it, the file descriptor you open next will be 2. And if you or some external program you called by system() produces error message to ’stderr’ – your file would be corrupted. It actually happened to me. If you don’t want your program to show error messages on the screen, please reopen stderr to somewhere else, rather than close it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 am
Cool, but since you’re using ansi c streams as opposed to unix file io isn’t this a bug in glibc? Shouldn’t glibc be checking to see if the file descriptor is open before fdopening file descriptor 2?
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:07 am
Naveed: Is that what happened?
Yep.
Brendan Miller: Cool, but since you’re using ansi c streams as opposed to unix file io isn’t this a bug in glibc? Shouldn’t glibc be checking to see if the file descriptor is open before fdopening file descriptor 2?
I am 99.9% sure UNIX file io would do the same thing.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Than the logical solution is 2>/dev/null ?
April 24th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Yep.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Which has started the whole ordeal as an uglu and a bad thing …
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
[...] Do not close stderr [...]
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