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Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 23:25:08 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To: Don Sullivan <sullivan@gaia.arc.nasa.gov>
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Subject: Re: Pardon the ignorance
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In the last episode (May 15), Don Sullivan said:
> 
> In the change to stdio.h in FreeBSD 4.8, you say:
> "std{in,out,err} are no longer compile time constants."
> 
> Please pardon my incredible ignorance, but what does that mean ?
> Can you please point me to a reference ?
> 
> FILE *def_thing = stdout;
> 
> no longer works.
> apparently, it shouldn't. why ?

I think it was changed because the size of "struct file" aka FILE
needed to change, and the only way to be sure that stdin/out/err got
initialized to the right locations was to have libc do it instead of
the program.

Linux made this same change back in 6.0 ( see
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3137 )

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com