On Mon, Jul 06, 2020 at 09:45:59PM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote: > bug-b...@trodman.com writes: > > foo | tee >(cat >&2) | bar > > I do wonder how portable >( ... ) is in practice, versus the portability > of /dev/stderr. Maybe I worry about the former because I'm not > practiced in named-FIFO programming and so think of it as non-universal.
On Linux and BSD systems, >( ) will use a /dev/fd/ entry. On most commercial Unix systems, where /dev/fd/ does not exist, it will use a named pipe in /var/tmp. On a hypothetical system where neither one is available (Microsoft Windows?), I believe it may use a temp file. That decision is made at bash's compile time. The semantics of /dev/fd/* and named pipes are not quite identical, so if you're relying on some very *special* mechanisms, then there could indeed be portability issues. For most scripts, however, it shouldn't matter.
