NAME

stderr, stdin, stdout - standard I/O streams

SYNOPSIS

#include <stdio.h>

extern FILE *stderr, *stdin, *stdout;


DESCRIPTION

^[CX] The functionality described on this reference page is aligned with the ISO C standard. Any conflict between the requirements described here and the ISO C standard is unintentional. This volume of POSIX.1-2008 defers to the ISO C standard.

A file with associated buffering is called a stream and is declared to be a pointer to a defined type FILE. The fopen() function shall create certain descriptive data for a stream and return a pointer to designate the stream in all further transactions. Normally, there are three open streams with constant pointers declared in the <stdio.h> header and associated with the standard open files.

At program start-up, three streams shall be predefined and need not be opened explicitly: standard input (for reading conventional input), standard output (for writing conventional output), and standard error (for writing diagnostic output). When opened, the standard error stream is not fully buffered; the standard input and standard output streams are fully buffered if and only if the stream can be determined not to refer to an interactive device.

^[CX] The following symbolic values in <unistd.h> define the file descriptors that shall be associated with the C-language stdin, stdout, and stderr when the application is started:

STDIN_FILENO

Standard input value, stdin. Its value is 0.

STDOUT_FILENO

Standard output value, stdout. Its value is 1.

STDERR_FILENO

Standard error value, stderr. Its value is 2.

The stderr stream is expected to be open for reading and writing.

RETURN VALUE

None.

ERRORS

No errors are defined.

EXAMPLES

None.

APPLICATION USAGE

None.

RATIONALE

None.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

None.

SEE ALSO

fclose, feof, ferror, fileno, fopen, fprintf, fread, fscanf, fseek, getc, gets, popen, putc, puts, read, setbuf, setvbuf, tmpfile, ungetc, vfprintf

XBD <stdio.h>, <unistd.h>

CHANGE HISTORY

First released in Issue 1.

Issue 6

Extensions beyond the ISO C standard are marked.

A note that stderr is expected to be open for reading and writing is added to the DESCRIPTION.