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I see, and thank you for the clarification. My main problem then is the blog post for the redirection section is poorly written and plain wrong with regards to the examples and pictures.

Their example is $ cat /tmp/root_content.txt

And then in the picture the show that the `cat` program's stdout is `/tmp/root_content.txt`, which is incorrect according to your description. This would only be correct if it was then redirected or piped.

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Their description was correct. What they missed off the /tmp/root_content.txt example was that the shell would create that file first, then launch the program pointing it's STDOUT to that file.

Because those streams are file system objects that use the same reading and writing APIs as regular files, it means you can also substitute them for regular files too. Which is what's happening in that specific example.

Essentially UNIX supports a whole array of special files that might behave slightly differently in the background but all can be interfaced with using the same principles as any regular file. It's quite a clever solution - albeit not without it's problems, kludges and mistakes too.

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