From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2003-07-29T13:54:48+09:00
Subject: Re: How do I tell when my CLI output is piped?

David Landrith wrote:

> ... I'd like 
> to be able to automatically sense when the output is being piped to 
> somewhere else, so that I can automatically make the report switch to a 
> tab delimited format a la the mysql command line client.

In C, this is normally done using the standard library routine isatty(file_descriptor) which returns non-zero when output is going to a terminal.

Looking at the documentation for IO in pickaxe, there is an isatty() method.

So, I would imagine you can do something like (completely untested!) ...

   if $stdout.isatty
       puts "Going to a terminal"
   else
       puts "Going somewhere else"
   end

Note that this would also include if you redirect the output to a file.

Hope that helps.

Harry O.