[prog] echoing something to STDERR

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 11:57:03PM +1100, Jenn Vesperman wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 07:20, Hamster wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 21:14:39 +0100
> > Hamster <hamster at hamsternet.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > [ -f foo.txt ] || echo "foo.txt doesnt exist" 
> > > 
> > > The problem with this is that echo plonks stuff on STDOUT, I want it to go
> > > to STDERR.
> > > 
> > > How do I do that?
> 
> You can also try stuff like cat "foo.txt doesn't exist" > stderr.

I assume this is a joke?

Why is this so neat?  All you're doing is giving cat your message, which
cat interprets as the name of a file, said file does not exist, and you
get a message 

        cat: foo.txt doesn't exist: No such file or directory

which would be rather confusing for error messages about things other
than nonexistant files.
Oh, and you also end up with an empty file called "stderr".

I think the original solution (>&2) was neater.

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