Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: 4.3bsd sh problems
Message-ID: <8806@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 30 Oct 88 21:04:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: smoke.8806
References: <67700005@cdp> <14247@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 19

In article <14247@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
-In article <67700005@cdp> hemenway@cdp.UUCP writes:
->	exec 2> /dev/null
->	echo This message goes to /dev/null as it should. 1>&2
->	xxabcxx		# error message should go to /dev/null--it doesn't
->The above script sends sh error messages to /dev/null only when stderr is
->redirected to /dev/null from the command line that called the script.
-As far as I know, this is how things are supposed to work.

No, it should work as Kathy expected.

-What does POSIX say about each of these?

It's not standardized yet.  One hopes that 1003.2 won't canonicalize
the zillions of bugs in older Bourne shells!

My advice to Kathy is (assuming she has an SVR2 or later source
license) to get the BRL Bourne shell and install it (properly
configured, of course) in place of /bin/sh.