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❪◑❫ Standard Streams ○｜Definition｜1st｜20260927112549-00-⌔
Standard streams
In computer programming, standard streams are preconnected input and output communication channels1 between a computer program and its environment when it begins execution. The three input/output (I/O) connections are called standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr). Originally I/O happened via a physically connected system console (input via keyboard, output via monitor), but standard streams abstract this. When a command is executed via an interactive shell, the streams are typically connected to the text terminal on which the shell is running, but can be changed with redirection or a pipeline. More generally, a child process inherits the standard streams of its parent process.
Printed 2026-09-27.
Link to original Footnotes
Ritchie, Dennis M. (October 1984). “A Stream Input-Output System” (PDF). AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal. 68 (8): 1897–1910. ↩
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