Check if a stream is process.stdout

Question

Is there an elegant way to determine if a stream is process.stdout

I am working with streams and will like to end the stream, but found out that if the stream is process.stdout an error is thrown because process.stdout is a special stream that cannot be closed. So want to end all streams except it's process.stdout

I tried using a try and catch, but the process.stdout error ends the node process, ignoring the try and catch.

Teneshatenesmus

Answer 1

Perhaps this is naive of me, but I'd think you can just check with !==:

if (theStream !== process.stdout) {
    theStream.end();
}

Streams are objects, and there's only one process.stdout, so...

Sarraute

I personally think a try/catch block, which eats the exception, is quite possibly the best way to do it - obviously rethrowing the error if it is not the exact one you expect :) – Wray

@Barnabus: I just read the last sentence in the question (which I'd somehow missed), where the OP suggests doing that blows up the process. (Which seems very surprising.) – Sarraute

@Barnabus: Wow, and I've just verified that with Node v4 and Node v7. – Sarraute

That is suprising. Especially considering the docs mention that calling end() throws! You would have thought the error would be catchable – Wray

@Barnabus: You can indeed catch that exception. But then the next time you try to write to process.stdout (for instance, via console.log), it throws with Error: write after end. – Sarraute

Another method I found was this "process.stdout instanceof require('stream').Writable" will return false, but true for other types of streams. Not sure how far it will work though – Teneshatenesmus