VMD-L Mailing List

From: Charles McAnany (vmdnamd_at_charlesmcanany.com)
Date: Thu Jan 28 2016 - 12:23:46 CST

Friends,
I'm building a program that should write a .psf file to stdout (literally,
open_file_write("/proc/self/fd/1", "psf", natoms); and similar for other
platforms), and I'm sort of confused by the mix of printf( and
fprintf(stderr, in plugins/molfile_plugin/src/psfplugin.c. It seems that
about a third of the errors are sent to stdout and the rest to stderr.

For a program that writes a psf to stdout, this is sort of irritating
because I have to either taint the vmd source by changing all the printf(s
to fprintf(stderr,s or make a great fuss with file descriptors (which is
also a portability problem).

If this would be a simple fix, I'd really appreciate it. Of course, if it
would break something in vmd (like sending messages to the shell rather
than the tk console), it's a pretty minor request compared to the usability
of vmd. =)

Cheers,
Charles McAnany.