closing stdin, stdout and stderr

[Martijn Brouwer]

I am writing a unix daemon in python, so I want to close stdin, stdout
and stderr.
My first attempt was to the standard file descriptors using their
close() methods. After closing stdout, I could not print anymore, so
this seemed to work. However, later I noticed that they were not really
closed. When I close them using os.close(), it did work.
What is the difference between these two methods and what is the reason
behind it? It took me a day to find out why I could not log out after
starting the daemon.

Martijn