I'd like to implement a verbosity level flag in a Fortran program in the following way. The code would use statements
write (level1, *) 'This will be shown always'
write (level2, *) 'This will be shown sometimes'
and the streams level1, level2 and higher would either be equal to output_unit or correspond to /dev/null (on Unix), depending on the value of the verbosity flag provided by the user.
However, /dev/null is not platform independent. I could try to detect Windows manually and work with NUL there, but I don't want to write platform-specific code. Is there a platform-independent way of writing to an output sink with write in Fortran?
I've made my earlier comment into an answer so we can tick this question off ...
Fortran doesn't provide a platform independent way to send output into the void. If I wanted the facility I might write a little platform-dependent code, and wrap it into a module so I never had to look at it again.