Question

The following C file gives a bogus result when NUL is piped to it:

int main()
{
  printf("_isatty = %d\n", _isatty(0));
}

the result is:

C:\Users\Edward\Dev\nulltest> test.exe < NUL
_isatty = 64

I’m pretty sure NUL (aka /dev/null) is not a terminal device! So I need to detect in another way whether or not the file descriptor corresponds to NUL. The number doesn’t have any specific meaning; I see it when I actually do have a terminal attached.

What should I do? This question suggests using a sketchy undocumented function to get the underlying name, presumably comparing it to NUL, but that feels less than ideal to me. Is there a better way?

P.S. This would help solve this GHC bug.

Answer 1

From msdn:

_isatty returns a nonzero value if the descriptor is associated with a
character device. Otherwise, _isatty
returns 0.

NUL is like /dev/null on Unix, it’s a char device.

Note that on Linux, isatty is different:

The isatty() function tests whether fd
is an open file descriptor referring
to a terminal.

What you can do is try to compare STDIN_FILENO (0) with ${cwd}/NUL (using stat or stat).

Update:

int ret = GetFileType(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE));

It will return FILE_TYPE_CHAR for NUL or tty.

See GetFileType documentation for other values. You can detect files/char device/pipes.

Update Final:

Use GetConsoleMode for input and GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo for output.

CONSOLE_SCREEN_BUFFER_INFO sbi;
DWORD mode;
if (!GetConsoleMode(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE), &mode))
   fprintf(stderr, "not console\n");
else
   fprintf(stderr, "console\n");
if (!GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), &sbi))
   fprintf(stderr, "not console\n");
else
  fprintf(stderr, "console\n");