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/dev/stdout, or anything of the sort. It's instead due to the behavior ofdd. Your 1st and 3rd examples givedda file handle that directly references the file. When using theof=option,ddperforms a truncation. Your 2nd exampleddis truncating the pipe between it andcat(which effectively does nothing), not the file itself. Sorry, but I do have to -1, because the behavior of an arbitrary program is unrelated to the original question, as well as incorrectly describing the behavior. P.S:ddhas anotruncoption for this.ddas a simple tool to serve as an example for any tool that can take an output filename as an argument. The behavior is also seen with any other tool - but some (portable) tool is needed to provide examples of non-portability. To clarify: the point I'm making is that/dev/stdoutand>>don't work well together on Linux, rendering/dev/stdoutnot portable. For testing this I actually compiled the simplest C code in order to eliminate all other options. I added some code to the answer, please see for yourself and check different OSes. The code is not portable; why?