Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

doc: stdout/stderr can block when directed to file #3170

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Nov 5, 2015
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
15 changes: 6 additions & 9 deletions doc/api/process.markdown
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -282,7 +282,9 @@ For example, a `console.log` equivalent could look like this:

`process.stderr` and `process.stdout` are unlike other streams in Node.js in
that they cannot be closed (`end()` will throw), they never emit the `finish`
event and that writes are always blocking.
event and that writes can block when output is redirected to a file (although
disks are fast and operating systems normally employ write-back caching so it
should be a very rare occurrence indeed.)

To check if Node.js is being run in a TTY context, read the `isTTY` property
on `process.stderr`, `process.stdout`, or `process.stdin`:
Expand All @@ -305,14 +307,9 @@ A writable stream to stderr (on fd `2`).

`process.stderr` and `process.stdout` are unlike other streams in Node.js in
that they cannot be closed (`end()` will throw), they never emit the `finish`
event and that writes are usually blocking.

- They are blocking in the case that they refer to regular files or TTY file
descriptors.
- In the case they refer to pipes:
- They are blocking in Linux/Unix.
- They are non-blocking like other streams in Windows.

event and that writes can block when output is redirected to a file (although
disks are fast and operating systems normally employ write-back caching so it
should be a very rare occurrence indeed.)

## process.stdin

Expand Down