> what is stdout actually for then.
I guess the usual distinction is that stdout gets the "proper" output
of a non-sink program (e.g. for ls(1) the actual directory listing,
while diagnostic information (ls: foo: Permission denied) goes
to stderr for the user to look at, and to not have it creep up a pipeline.
> [...] we may want an informative message such as
> `leased 1.2.3.4 for 3600 seconds` to be on stdout.
If using the DHCP client in a one-shot mode (dhc{pcd,lient} -1), yes, it
wouldn't exactly hurt if it printed the resulting lease info to stdout.
Whether "leased 1.2.3.4 for 3600 seconds" would be preferrable over e.g.
"1.2.4.4\t3600", I don't know. The latter is marginally easier to parse,
the former is more useful if there is no next stage of a pipeline.
Cheers
