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The flexibility of STDOUT
Page created: 2023-06-21Up to scripts
Lately, I’ve been having most of my command-line programs write directly to STDOUT, even if I intend for the output to end up in a file.
Here’s why, in the form of a list:
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You can debug by viewing and filtering the output immediately
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Less code (don’t worry about opening a file and handling permissions, etc.)
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You can easily wrap the program in a shell script that writes to a file
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The output can be used with other tools
A really fun example of this is my cgi-local-dynamic on-the-fly generation of page content from source from the same tool I wrote for static site generation.