Piping data to Linux program which expects a TTY (

问题:

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.

回答1:

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