CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxterminalpipettypty
pts
pts

Reputation: 87221

Piping data to Linux program which expects a TTY (terminal)

I have a program in Linux which refuses to run if its stdin/stdout is not a TTY (terminal device). Is there an easy-to-use tool which will create a PTY, start the program with the newly created TTY, and copy all data over stdin/stdout?

The use case is not interactive, but scripting. I'm looking for the most lightweight solution, preferably not creating TCP connections, and not requiring too many other tools and libraries to be installed.

Upvotes: 27

Views: 8995

Answers (2)

Anthony O.
Anthony O.

Reputation: 24307

You can use socat for this: echo your stdin strings | socat EXEC:"your_program",pty STDIO >/stdout_file

For example with bash: echo ls | socat EXEC:'bash',pty STDIO >/tmp/ls_out

Or as described here, for a program run with docker:

# Run the docker task, here bash, in background
docker run -it --rm --name test ubuntu &
# Send "ls -la" to the bash running inside docker
echo 'ls -la' | socat EXEC:'docker attach test',pty STDIN
# Show the result
docker logs test

Upvotes: 1

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

Reputation: 798556

unbuffer, part of expect (sudo apt-get install expect-dev on Ubuntu Lucid), can fool a program into thinking it's connected to a TTY.

$ tty 
/dev/pts/3
$ echo | tty 
not a tty
$ echo | unbuffer tty 
/dev/pts/11

Upvotes: 39

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