Reading from stderr

[Mike McNally]

Am I in good company in believing that a program that reads from
standard error is a naughty program?  It seems to be done (usually) as
an alternative to the horrible drudgery of opening /dev/tty.  I ask
because I'm facing the problem of fixing our OS to cope with this
(actually it'll just be a minor, even trivial, change to init, and
maybe some stuff in the stdio library).  Maybe I'm old fashioned, but
if I want to read a response from the terminal I figure it's best to go
ahead and open the tty.  I mean, somebody invented /dev/tty for that
very reason; hell, even RSTS has KB:!

Uncompress does it, by the way; that's the only thing about the compress
stuff I can find to complain about.

-- 
Mike McNally                                    Lynx Real-Time Systems
uucp: {voder,athsys}!lynx!m5                    phone: 408 370 2233

            Where equal mind and contest equal, go.