On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 9:27 AM, Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote: > I probably should have said "stdin", but in theory you can pass data > in via multiple file descriptors. Nobody does that except people > cooking up obscure examples for advanced shell scripting guides...
Yep. With that variant, I agree that it's more common than env vars (apart from standard ones - *heaps* of programs are affected by stuff like LANG or HOME or PATH, but they're not passed at the command line); what your description put me in mind of, though, was the special handling sometimes done between two programs, like when the Unix program loader finds a #! and exec's an interpreter to process the script - for security, it has to pass the fd, not the file name, to the interpreter. But that's really esoteric! Of course, whenever you fork without execing (execking?), you can pass (or share) file descriptors easily. Very common, but not exactly command-line stuff. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
