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For a command, if using - as an argument in place of a file name will mean STDIN or STDOUT.

  1. But in this example, it creates a file with the name -:

    echo hello > -

    How can I make - in this example mean STDOUT?

  2. Conversely, how can I make - mean a file named - in examples such as:

    cat -
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Since I apparently have to have 50 reputation to comment directly... On the /dev/stdin /dev/stdout comment, AIX, which is a legitimate UNIX derivative does not have these pseudodevices. And, as a further comment, LINUX is not a UNIX derivative in any case. It is a POSIX-compliant workalike, and the most popular of the UNIX-ish OS's at this point, but make no mistake, this is no UNIX. But, the gist of the replies here are correct. The "-" notation is not interpreted as special by the shell, and is thus passed directly to each individual application as an ARG. If the application does not recogni –  user95873 Dec 23 '14 at 20:04

4 Answers 4

up vote 37 down vote accepted

Using - as a filename to mean stdin/stdout is a convention that a lot of programs use. It is not a special property of the filename. The kernel does not recognise - as special so any system calls referring to - as a filename will use - literally as the filename.

With bash redirection, - is not recognised as a special filename, so bash will use that as the literal filename.

When cat sees the string - as a filename, it treats it as a synonym for stdin. To get around this, you need to alter the string that cat sees in such a way that it still refers to a file called -. The usual way of doing this is to prefix the filename with a path - ./-, or /home/Tim/-. This technique is also used to get around similar issues where command line options clash with filenames, so a file referred to as ./-e does not appear as the -e command line option to a program, for example.

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It's worth adding that /dev/stdin and /dev/stdout are universally available and can be used in place of the - convention. –  jmtd Jul 22 '11 at 9:00
Also in the cat case, using redirection instead of listing the argument might help: cat <-; however, it would be hard to mix and match that with concatenating more than one file at a time. –  jmtd Jul 22 '11 at 9:02
@jmtd: /dev/std{in,out} are not universally available. Not all unixes have it. –  camh Jul 22 '11 at 10:37
Interesting, I assumed they were part of POSIX (but can't confirm). They're present at least on Linux, the BSDs and Solaris. Can you give an example of a modern UNIX that lacks them? –  jmtd Aug 2 '11 at 8:51
  1. Instead of echo hello > -, you can use echo hello > /dev/stdout.

    While '-' is a convention that has to be implemented by each program wanting to support it, /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr are, when supported by the OS (at least Solaris, Linux and BSDs do), independent of the application and then will work as you intend.

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As for 1, the program has to support it. You can't just arbitrarily use it. As for 2, redirect input from (e.g., cat < -).

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As camh mentioned, - is just a naming convention used by some programs. If you want to refer to these streams with a file descriptor the shell will recognize, jiliagre was correct in having you use the name /dev/stdin or /dev/stdout instead. Those file names should work any place a normal file name would work.

  1. That being said, your first example is kind of silly. Any output that would be caught by the redirect operator to write to a file is already ON standard-output, so redirecting it and writing it back to where it came from is useless. The behavior you use there is the pipe, not a redirect:

    echo hello |
  2. In your second example you simply need to give can some indication that you want a litteral file of that name, not the internal alias it has. You can do this easiest by specifying a path to the file like this:

    cat ./-
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