Paul Vinkenoog wrote:
Does anybody know why (Firebird 1.5's) gsec writes normal output to stderr instead of stdout? Observed in batch mode with `gsec -di`. On both Linux and Windows the entire listing went to stderr.
Ann W. Harrison answers:
Sigh. In the early days (1984) it was complete ignorance. Then there was the question of "since it's been that way so long, if we fix it will we break other things?"
Stefan Heymann adds:
It's the same with GBAK (and probably all other G* tools). I have no clue why they decided to do that.
Milan Babuskov answers: Maybe the idea was to enable GBAK to write the backup file to stdout, so you can redirect it to some other program. For example, on-the-fly backup and compress:
gbak -b database.fdb | gzip backup.gz -
This could be usable if you have very big databases and not too much disk space. One can even redirect the backup to another machine like that (using scp or whatever).