Jan. 28, 2008
9:44 p.m.
While I couldn't locate such a document, it makes sense when you consider that if such a process is part of a pipeline you really don't want the prompts being handled as input by the downstream processes.
That's why mv and similar utilities prompt on standard error.
No, that doesn't really make sense. If you are in the middle of a pipe, what good does it do to write the prompt to stderr, yet read the user input from stdin? If you really care about processes that run in a pipe, interact with /dev/tty. Regards, Martin