Repeatedly creating files named /dev/stdin can be dangerous?

Question

In the third edition of "Learning the Bash shell" by Newham and Rosenblatt it is written in page 15 as a comment:

if a particular UNIX utility doesn't accept standard input when you leave out the filename argument, try using a dash (0) as the argument. Some NIX systems provide standard input as a file so you could try providing the file /dev/stdin as the input file argumnet.

The last sentence isn't clear to me - what's the meaning of "provide standard input as a file"?

Isn't it dangerous to "repeatedly" create files named /dev/stdin in a system (I personally use Ubuntu 16.04).

BTW I came across a similar case in this post.

Answer 1

This isn’t about creating /dev/stdin, it’s about using it: you specify /dev/stdin as the file to be used with whatever command doesn’t support standard input by default (or using -), to make it use its standard input anyway.

Thus

cat
cat -
cat /dev/stdin

all make cat read from its standard input (albeit in a slightly different way when using /dev/stdin, with a different file descriptor, which means it’s not equivalent in all cases). I’m not creating /dev/stdin, I’m using the pre-existing device node as an argument to cat.

• Kusalananda: Does accessing /dev/stdin like this with bash (specifically) actually use the device in /dev or does it use bash's own built-in/simulated device?
• Stephen Kitt: @Kusalananda the Bash manual says "If the operating system on which Bash is running provides these special files, bash will use them; otherwise it will emulate them internally with the behavior described below." so if there is a node in /dev Bash uses that.
• Kusalananda: I was just about to go look at the source code. Reading the manual is cheating ;-) Thanks.
• Stéphane Chazelas: They're all equivalent except on Linux (and possibly Cygwin), where /dev/stdin is a link to the file opened on stdin. Opening it will not give you the same open file description as on stdin (contrary to on other systems). On Linux, opening /dev/stdin won't work when stdin is a socket (try echo foo | cat /dev/stdin in ksh93 for instance), could give you the other end of a pipe. For seekable files (like regular files), it would open the file at the beginning (try (head > /dev/null; cat /dev/stdin) < /etc/passwd and compare with cat or cat - for instance).
• Stéphane Chazelas: @Kusalananda, in the case of cat /dev/stdin, since cat is not a shell builtin in bash, bash cannot "emulate" anything. It just passes /dev/stdin as argument to cat. It's only in the target of redirections that bash may emulate those.