Why is STDERR the default output?

I'm not seeing anything relevant in the discussion archives, so if I missed something, I apologize!

I was just whipping up a quick script, and has a call to unison in it. Running unison always outputs the startup messages ("version, Looking for changes, etc."). I didn't really want output from the script, and so I added the usual `1>/dev/null` to the end of the command, but I discovered that `2>/dev/null​​` is where the output stream is written!

This seems very odd to me, as I'd expect stdout/stderr to function in the same way as everything I've encountered on Linux. Is there a reason that normal messaging is going to stderr? Now, I'm not quite sure how to capture actual error messages!

Thanks-

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].