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    It looks like it's even documented in the man page: "fuser outputs only the PIDs to stdout, everything else is sent to stderr.". That does seem like a rather extreme case, though, and a bit counterproductive even, IMO. Even if it makes sense regarding piping, it means something like whatever $(fuser foo) would leak the filenames to the terminal, and you'd have to explicitly redirect stderr. In which case one could just use an explicit option to only ask for the PIDs, if the tool had one. :) But it does have options for the common case of sending signals to the listed processes directly. Commented Feb 21 at 10:54
  • @ilkkachu I agree. I don't say it's a good practice to output things that aren't errors to stderr. I'm just explaining the apparent reasoning behind the behavior. Commented Feb 21 at 23:16