Question

I’m setting up fabric for the first time, and having trouble piping the output from fabric to less. For example, if I run:

fabric deploy |less

(Where deploy is my deployment function)

I get the following error back from fabric:

IOError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument

This comes from a run() command on the remote host.

If I add pty=False to the run() arguments, it works. However, that means every run command, I need to add this argument. Not to mention, I believe it has implications with prompts and entering data (obviously for those cases I won’t be piping to less).

How can I fix this? Should I just do tty=false for everything?

Answer 1

Just for future reference, I resolved this by applying a patch to operations.py, as seen here:

http://code.fabfile.org/attachments/56/operations.patch

Otherwise, the code that would reproduce this problem is as follows:

from __future__ import with_statement
from fabric.api import *
from fabric.contrib.console import confirm
import re
import sys

def test():
    run('ls')

And the issue would come up if you did the following command:

fab -H myhost test |less

Hope this helps someone… I still don’t understand why a bug this old still hasn’t been patched in the latest release of fabric.

-Dustin