Detect if stdout is redirected to a pipe (not to a file, character device, terminal, or socket)?

Question

Ideally, this would be scriptable in shell, but Perl or Python would be fine. C code could be helpful, but probably fails cost/benefit.

I recognize that redirection to a

Answer 1

You could do an fstat to the file descriptor and check returning structure, for example, st_mode = 0x1000 (S_IFIFO) indicates a Named Pipe.

Example with Python:

from __future__ import print_function
import sys
import os

print(os.fstat(sys.stdout.fileno()), file=sys.stderr)

Output on windows:

C:> python test_fd.py | more
nt.stat_result(st_mode=4096, st_ino=0L, st_dev=0, st_nlink=0, st_uid=0, st_gid=0, st_size=0L, st_atime=0L, st_mtime=0L, st_ctime=0L)

C:> python test_fd.py > test_fd.txt
nt.stat_result(st_mode=33206, st_ino=16888498602769633L, st_dev=0, st_nlink=1, st_uid=0, st_gid=0, st_size=0L, st_atime= 1401119520L, st_mtime=1401119520L, st_ctime=1401119349L)