require 'pty'

PTY

Creates and manages pseudo terminals (PTYs). See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo_terminal

PTY allows you to allocate new terminals using ::open or ::spawn a new terminal with a specific command.

Example

In this example we will change the buffering type in the factor command, assuming that factor uses stdio for stdout buffering.

If IO.pipe is used instead of PTY.open, this code deadlocks because factor’s stdout is fully buffered.

# start by requiring the standard library PTY
require 'pty'

master, slave = PTY.open
read, write = IO.pipe
pid = spawn("factor", :in=>read, :out=>slave)
read.close     # we dont need the read
slave.close    # or the slave

# pipe "42" to the factor command
write.puts "42"
# output the response from factor
p master.gets #=> "42: 2 3 7\n"

# pipe "144" to factor and print out the response
write.puts "144"
p master.gets #=> "144: 2 2 2 2 3 3\n"
write.close # close the pipe

# The result of read operation when pty slave is closed is platform
# dependent.
ret = begin
        master.gets     # FreeBSD returns nil.
      rescue Errno::EIO # GNU/Linux raises EIO.
        nil
      end
p ret #=> nil

PTY Reference