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Asked: 2026-05-16T23:26:59+00:00

Is – a shortcut for stdout in bash? If not what does it mean?

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Is ” – ” a shortcut for stdout in bash? If not what does it mean? For example,

wget -q -O - $line

How about stdin?

Thanks and regards!

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  1. Editorial Team

    As far as I know, bash isn’t involved with the usage of dash. It’s just a convention of many UNIX command line utilities to accept - as a placeholder for stdin or stdout when put in place of an input or output file name on the command line.

    Edit: found it, this behavior is specified in the POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines, §12.2.13 of The Open Group Base Specifications:

    For utilities that use operands to represent files to be opened for either reading or writing, the ‘-‘ operand should be used only to mean standard input (or standard output when it is clear from context that an output file is being specified).

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