On 07/10/2016 21:33, Timo Buhrmester wrote: >> 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.
The output isn't designed to be parsed any more than the output of /etc/rc.d/samba restart is. Would you say that both sending these informative messages to stdout is a bug? Roy