Linux nuisance: /dev/stdin doesn't work with sockets

Linux has this blitheringly annoying peculiarity that /dev/stdin won't work with sockets - it is hardcoded to return ENXIO. Try this: socat TCP-OPEN:localhost:1234 EXEC:cat\ /dev/stdin,nofork That's a perfectly reasonable command you'd expect to work, and does on basically every system, except Linux. (I'm using cat as a general example of any tool that opens a filename as the only way for you to specify a specific fd to use.) The linux kernel is explicitly written to forbid sensible use of /dev/stdin in this way ­— see http://marc.info/?l=ast-users&m=120978595414993 . If you only need unidirectional capability, you can buffer the data in a separate process: socat TCP-OPEN:localhost:1234 SYSTEM:'cat | thingy /dev/stdin' It's wasteful, and worse, is useless if thingy is meant to be reading and writing to the same fd, because pipes are unidirectional in Linux. What are we meant to do? /dev/stdin simply can't be used on Linux for building pipelines with bidirectional pipes, as far as I can tell, because sockets are the only underlying mechanism on Linux that yield a bidi stream with a single fd to read and write from (unlike a pair of pipes).