Bug#728775: apt-get unwarrantedly consumes input

[Steve Cotton <steve@s.cotton.clara.co.uk>]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 11:40 +0000, Zefram wrote:
> When apt-get is invoked in a way that involves actually installing a
> package, it reads any available data from standard input, regardless of
> actual need.  This breaks the usual ability, at an interactive shell,
> to type the next command while the current one is running: apt-get
> consumes input that was intended for the shell.

Hi Zefram,

It's to avoid someone typing their next command while packages are
downloading, but then that input being used as the answer to a
prompt during installation.

There is an undocumented control flag DPkg::FlushSTDIN.  It was
added for the use case of scripted responses to dpkg's prompts
(bug #63991), before debconf existed.  Also the fix added for bug
#192228 should also work for #63991's use-case.  So that flag
should possibly be removed rather than documented.

But for your use-case of an interactive shell, wouldn't it be
safer to just open another terminal?

Cheers,
Steve