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From: steved@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (Steve Dempsey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help! "pg: cannot reopen stdout"
Summary: files in /dev
Keywords: /dev/tty
Message-ID: <1034@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>
Date: 22 Jan 89 02:43:06 GMT
References: <449@fciva.FRANKLIN.COM>
Sender: news@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU
Reply-To: steved@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (Steve Dempsey)
Organization: Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523
Lines: 28

In article <449@fciva.FRANKLIN.COM> fciva!dag@uunet.uu.net	 (Daniel A. Graifer) writes:
>Somebody please help.
> [...]
>I wanted to do a chmod 622 /dev/tty1*, but I did chmod 622 /dev/tty*.
                                                                   -^-
>I realized my mistake, did an ls -l on our old system, and chmod'd everything
>back to the way it is on the old system.
>
>Everything seemed fine until I got on a terminal in my personal account and
>tried to look at file with pg (actually, /usr/bin/pg). I got:
>
>pg: unable to reopen stdout
>
>Anybody got any ideas?

Interactive things like pg often use /dev/tty as stdout.  I was once
frustrated for days by code that behaved like this.  It turns out that
the it explicitly opened /dev/tty, but reported the error cryptically
as `can't open stdout' or some such.  Anyway, the fix was to chmod 666
/dev/tty.  I suspect that one was overlooked in the repair attempt.

>Daniel A. Graifer
>uunet!fciva!dag

        Steve Dempsey,  Center for Computer Assisted Engineering
  Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523    +1 303 491 0630
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