piping to a screen pager (e.g. less(1) or more(1)) blocks program

[bxparks]

As noted in the README.md, if the executable (e.g. SampleTest.out) is piped to a screen pager like less(1) or more(1), sometimes (not all the time) the executable hangs and displays nothing on the pager program. The program seems to be blocking on the standard input. The problem is probably caused by an interaction between how the screen pager manipulates the stdin and how I place the stdin into "raw" mode in Arduino.cpp. I would love to fix this, but I don't know enough about Unix tty device configuration to figure this out.

In the meantime, the workaround is to explicitly redirect the stdin using /dev/null, like this:

$ ./SampleTest.out | less # hangs
$ ./SampleTest.out < /dev/null | less # works

[mmrazik]

@bxparks please see my pull request

[bxparks]

@mmrazik: Let's transfer the discussion from #24 to here.

The number of lines needed to trigger the error seems to be variable. Changes across machine and OS, sometimes different on the same machine. I checked in a version of PipeFail that prints out 2000 lines, and that seems to trigger this problem on all machines that I tested today:

• Ubuntu MATE 20.04
• Linux Mint 20 (20.04 based)
• Mac OS 10.13.3 (Mojave)
• FreeBSD 12.2

[bxparks]

I believe I have finally fixed this with bf6248f.