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Re: Help on /dev/tty and su -c



Francesco Poli wrote:
> Warning! I am *not* subscribed to the debian-ruby list, hence,
> please Cc: me on replies. Thanks!
> ...
> The most general issue is that apt-listbugs needs to perform the
> following steps (when run in "apt" mode):
> 
>   * first it reads some input through its STDIN, through a pipe
> 
>   * when this input ends (EOF), apt-listbugs needs to be able to become
> interactive and ask questions to the user, and get answers from STDIN,
> and possibly also run a web browser (that could be a textual browser,
> depending on the user preferences) and let the user interact with the
> browser

Being a long time Unix programmer the above two contraints appear to
me to be opposing contraints that are not possible to accomplish in a
portable way.  Sure you can hack around them in some hackish way.  But
I do not think it is a good idea to do so since the hack will almost
certainly come back to haunt you at some time in the future.
Therefore I suggest addressing the issue at the source of the problem
by restructuring it such that this problem is entirely avoided.

Is there no way to read the data piped data by some method other than
standard input?  By using a named pipe or temporary file?  Then stdin
will always be available for interactive use.

I am sorry but not being familiar with the structure requires me to
ask some questions by which I hope the answers would lead someone to a
better solution.  What is the root underlying reason for reading stdin
for the data?  What is the framework which lead to that data flow
design?

Bob

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