Re: [Fwd: isatty function?]

[Paul D. Smith]

%% mst <address@hidden> writes:

  m> It turns out that there's no easy way, now, to determine inside the
  m> makefile whether the output is to tty or now.

  m> the simple $(shell perl -e 'print 1 if (-t STDOUT)')
  m> does not work, since anything inside a shell is sending output
  m> to shell and not to tty!
  m> I ended up doing this:
  m> .PHONE: isatty.mak
  m> include isatty.mak
  m> isatty.mak:
  m>      @perl -e 'print "isatty:=",(-t STDOUT),"\n"' > $@

  m> and this works but it forces an extra evaluation of makefile
  m> and seems too complicated for a simple thing like that ...

  m> How about a nwe function $(isatty [n]) - like isatty on file n?

Hmm.  This is an extremely rare situation--I think this is the first
time anyone has asked for it.

Unfortunately I don't think this is appropriate for a new function in
GNU make: it's too rarely needed and it's _very_ system specific (what
would that function do on a VMS system, or an Amiga system?)

In the future we will be integrating a scripting language with GNU make,
to provide a much richer set of function capabilities (this is one main
reason I don't want to add too many new functions).  Hopefully that
language will have facilities for testing this.


Thanks for the request...

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