Yet another unicode WTF

[Ben Finney]

Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon at flownet.com> writes:

> According to what I thought I knew about unix (and I had fancied myself 
> a bit of an expert until just now) this is impossible.  Python is 
> obviously picking up a different default encoding when its output is 
> being piped to a file, but I always thought one of the fundamental 
> invariants of unix processes was that there's no way for a process to 
> know what's on the other end of its stdout.

It certainly can. If you're using GNU and a terminal that declares
support for colour, examine the difference between these two:

$ ls --color=auto
$ ls --color=auto > foo ; cat foo

> Clues appreciated.  Thanks.

Research ‘man 3 isatty’ for the function most commonly used to determine
whether a file descriptor represents a terminal.

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Ben Finney