Comment by jibal
5 hours ago
No, the shell author needed some way to distinguish file descriptor 1 from a file named "1" (note that 2>1 means to write stderr to the file named "1"), and '&' was one of the few available characters. It's not the address of anything.
To be consistent, it would be &2>&1, but that makes it more verbose than necessary and actually means something else -- the first & means that the command before it runs asynchronously.
It's not inconsistent. The & is attached to the redirection operator, not to the 1 token. The file descriptor being redirected is also attached:
Thus you cannot write:
You also cannot write
However you may write
The n>& is one clump.