tony@oha.UUCP (Tony Olekshy) (05/14/88)
In <2661@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes: > > I am having a problem with always getting an error message back to the > terminal from which the command was issued... > Now, of course, if I knew the explicit name of the ex-controlling terminal, > I could open that and send the error message to it. I long ago tired of trying to reliably determine the current tty name. However, I also long ago standardized on a /sys/etc/login script that is source'd in *every* user's .login. /sys/etc/login includes a setenv TTY "`tty`" which works (ie: does *not* set TTY to "not a tty") because stdio is connected to the terminal while .login runs. As a result, I can use getenv("TTY") in c programs and "$TTY" in shell scripts, and if I find TTY undefined or empty I can say something intelligent to the user. This has the added advantage that you can run a background command with stuff that would go to $TTY redirected to another place, just use; sh -c 'TTY=some_place my_command' &