Doug McNaught <doug@wireboard.com> writes:
> Bear Giles <bear@coyotesong.com> writes:
>> We can agree that it should be more forthcoming with meaningful
>> help for people setting up the system, but it can't just write an
>> message to STDOUT because its caller has probably already set up
>> a pipe to another process - any error message would normally find
>> itself inserted into the mail queue!
> Gaah. Has djb ever heard of syslog(3)?
Or stderr? There's a good reason why Unix has both stdout and stderr
as part of the standard process model. stderr is for human-readable
error messages. In a noninteractive situation you can send it to
/dev/null, if you don't believe in logging; but when a human is running
a program it's polite to say something on stderr before going belly-up.
regards, tom lane
