In article <20021108174023.69948170.bjorn_persson.spam-is-evil@sverige.nu>, Bj�rn Persson writes: > On 7 Nov 2002 19:36:32 -0600 > Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) wrote: > >> On VMS you would just open a Sequential_IO file for output saying the >> name is SYS$OUTPUT. Isn't the same thing available on other operating >> systmes ? > > Not that I know of. That would require a special filename meaning "the file or pipe or whatever that is currently associated with the standard output stream". Is that what SYS$OUTPUT is in VMS? Yes, that is what SYS$OUTPUT is. By default it is a process-permanent file so successive programs writing to SYS$OUTPUT all write to the same version of the file (if it is on disk) rather than each creating a new versions. Of course versioning is irrelevant if the output is a terminal, although it does matter if the output is to an ANSI magtape. > I tried using Ada.Text_IO.Name on the standard files and got "*stdi", *stdou" and "*stder" regardless of whether they were redirected or not. Open(file, Out_File, "*stder") tried to open a disk file with that name. To what operating system do those results apply ?