An organization has multiple containers and wants to view STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR I/O streams of a specific container. What command should be used?

The docker logs command is the standard utility for fetching the logs of a container. It aggregates and displays the standard output (STDOUT) and standard error (STDERR) streams generated by the main process running inside the specified container. This allows an administrator or developer to view the real-time or historical output for debugging and monitoring purposes, directly addressing the requirement to view the container's I/O streams.

docker top CONTAINER-NAME: This command lists the running processes inside a container, similar to the top command in Linux, but does not show the I/O streams.

docker stats CONTAINER-NAME: This command provides a live stream of a container's resource usage statistics, such as CPU and memory, not its application logs.

docker inspect CONTAINER-NAME: This command returns detailed, low-level metadata about a container's configuration in JSON format, not the application's output.

1. Official Docker Documentation, docker logs command reference: "The docker logs command fetches the logs of a container. The command shows the STDOUT and STDERR of the main process of the container."

Source: Docker Docs, engine/reference/commandline/logs/

2. Official Docker Documentation, docker top command reference: "Display the running processes of a container."

Source: Docker Docs, engine/reference/commandline/top/

3. MIT Missing Semester of Your CS Education, Courseware: "To see the output of the command that was run in the container, you can use docker logs . Each time you run the command, it will print the full output from the command."

Source: MIT CSAIL, Missing Semester, 2020, "Containers", Section: "Docker".

4. Official Docker Documentation, docker stats command reference: "Display a live stream of container(s) resource usage statistics."

Source: Docker Docs, engine/reference/commandline/stats/