Re: Documentation about Multios is misleading, and perhaps untrue

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 9:05 PM dana <dana@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 10 Oct 2018, at 21:33, Tom Boyd <tvboyd23@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >What should be done about this ?
>
> Not sure if there's really an issue with the rest

A bit of common sense has to be applied here.  These are redirection
operators and are going to behave first like redirection operators,
which means that the shell is going to open the file descriptors
before executing any of the commands, and then pass those descriptors
around.  The semantics of redirections demands this.  An external
command like "cat" receives a list of names in its argument list and
processes the names one by one, so it can completely open and close
the file with each name before moving on to the next one, but the
shell can't do that and would be broken in other cases if it tried.

It's pointless to try to call call out every possible instance where
the fundamental semantics of shell operations affect a particular use
of the syntax.