From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2007-10-13T00:14:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Ignore printout

On Oct 11, 2007, at 22:45 , Fredrik wrote:
>> You will need to reopen STDOUT to /dev/null
>
> Then I have two more questions to that :)
>
> 1) What's the difference between $stdout and STDOUT? They seem to be
> the same thing.

http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2006/08/17/stdout-vs-stdout

In your case you want to reopen STDOUT because somebody using your  
code may have changed $stdout, if they want to capture or redirect  
output.

> 2) In my pickaxe book I read that "Assignment to $stdout is
> depracated; use $stdout.reopen instead." But if I want to redirect
> $stdout and then $direct it back to what it was before, surely I HAVE
> to use assignment to $stdout. Like this:

I don't think this is true anymore.  You can't reopen using StringIO  
to capture regular ruby puts or p.

> out = $stdout
> $stdout = File.new('/dev/null','w')
> puts 'This is not to be seen by anybody.'
> $stdout.reopen(out)
>
> If I use reopen on the second line instead, the 'out' variable comes
> along to this new value and nobody knows where the "usual stdout" is,
> right?

Right, you should dup $stdout there.

--
Poor workers blame their tools. Good workers build better tools. The
best workers get their tools to do the work for them. -- Syndicate Wars