[Haskell-cafe] ptys and hGetContent problem

[Mathijs Kwik]

Ok, cool

I got a bit further now.
I'm not using handles anymore (they seem to break indeed for ptys).
Just using executePseudoTerminalFd now (from the original blogpost)
and fdRead/fdWrite.
Now I can communicate with the process and all goes well.
If I really want lazy-like behaviour, I can just forkIo and talk
through a Chan, but for now this is enough.

Also sending "\^C" and "\^D" work as expected, although I just saw the
reply mentioning I should ask stty for the current EOF character.

The only thing I'm still looking for is a way to stop echoing input.
Right now, fdRead gives me back the output of the process, mixed with
the input I supplied.
I'm pretty sure this can be turned off.

Any suggestions?


On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Nick Bowler <nbowler at elliptictech.com> wrote:
> On 20:38 Mon 08 Mar     , Mathijs Kwik wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I found this blogpost from Bryan O'Sullivan
>> http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2008/09/30/unix-hacking-in-haskell-better-pseudoterminal-support/
>> and I wanted to try it out.
>>
>> Before moving to an interactive command (which needs pty), I just did
>> a small test for "ls -l /" to see if it worked.
>> I got it to compile, but when running, it throws an exception when
>> reaching the end of the output (in this case because I evaluate the
>> length to force reading all).
>> Main: /dev/ptmx: hGetContents: hardware fault (Input/output error)
>
> You have just stumbled into the wonderful world of pseudo-terminals,
> where their behaviour is subtly different on every bloody platform.  It
> appears that on your platform, after the last user closes the slave port
> (i.e. after your child process terminates), subsequent reads from the
> master port return EIO.
>
> One would normally detect this condition with the poll system call, by
> looking for POLLHUP on the master port.
>
> On some platforms (but evidently not yours), the last close of the slave
> port causes the behaviour you seem to have expected, where a subsequent
> read returns 0.
>
>> What's wrong? :)
>
> Presumably the problem is that handle-based I/O is not suitable for
> pseudo-terminal masters.  Definitely not lazy I/O.
>
>> And further...
>> If I do want to use an interactive program which needs input, how do I
>> send ctrl-d or ctrl-c?
>> tail -f needs ctrl-c (or I need to kill the process)
>
> These so-called "control characters" are normally configured by termios.
> If suitably configured, the appropriate action will be performed when
> the control characters are written to the master port.
>
> --
> Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)
>