"swapfd" (more unix ideas)

[jack at boring.UUCP]

It will get messy very soon. Besides the fact that you have no
idea how often the receiving process has dup()ped the file
descriptor you swapfd(), you should also send it a signal to tell
it that you mucked around with his file descriptors (SIGSWAPFD?).

Every program downto 'ls' looks at stdout to determine wether it is
a terminal nowadays, so you'd better notify it if you change it's
output.

By the way, even if you do so, the program will have a hard time getting
everything right. If you replace stdout by a file descriptor pointing
to another terminal, it will have to reset the mode of the previous
terminal (hoping it can find it...), if it was a terminal, and then
set the mode of the new terminal, if it is a terminal..........

It *would* be nice, though, to have a nice and clean mechanism to
say that you don't want the rest of the output of a command on
the terminal but on a file, but the stress is on *nice and clean*.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack at mcvax.UUCP
	The shell is my oyster.