Thanks Nick! I'll work on applying your suggestions a little later. And I'll add a note about it not working with subprocesses because I realized that I forgot to do that. 

Regarding redirect_stdfile, which is presumably what you meant by "name-based API", I started out with unqualified names like 'stdout', etc. I went with the qualified name as an attempt at making it more general (i.e.: if folks perhaps wanted to use this for something other than sys files) - I don't know whether or not this is useful - I don't have a use case in mind (anyone else got one?) - so I don't know if qualified names brings anything useful or not but that was the thinking. Thoughts on this are welcome.