(Some) interactive commands unusable with git-bash.exe

[harriha]

Hi,

Did a bit of searching, but couldn't find an issue about this - which, to be honest, is surprising. If there's an issue about this already, please feel free to close this one.

• Have latest portable version available (2.5.2.2, 64bit) (reproducable also in 2.5.1, didn't test other 2.x releases)
• Have PostgreSQL installed and configured properly (= binaries in PATH) with a password
• Open git-bash.exe from Explorer
• Type psql

Expected:

• There's a prompt asking the user to type in the password

Actual:

• Shell does nothing, seems to hang, need to exit with Ctrl-C

The same works fine if running the command from bin/bash.exe. Also, with the old 1.9.5 version of msysgit this works fine. I'm on Windows 8.1.

Encountered this with psql, but this might be a common thing with some other similar interactive programs?

$ git --version
git version 2.5.2.windows.2

$ psql --version
psql (PostgreSQL) 9.4.1

$ which psql
/c/Program Files/PostgreSQL/9.4/bin/psql

$ psql
 // nothing...

[dscho]

Isn't this covered in the Release Notes?

• Some console programs interact correctly with MinTTY only when called through winpty (e.g. the Python console needs to be started as winpty python instead of just python).

[harriha]

Oh shoot, of course it is - and now I remember reading that multiple times earlier. Yeah, never mind, sorry for the noise, closing.

[dscho]

@harriha Maybe you have an idea how to solve that? Maybe we could set some aliases, e.g. something like

case "$TERM" in
xterm*)
    # The following programs are known to require a Win32 Console
    # for interactive usage, therefore let's launch them through winpty
    # when run inside `mintty`.
    for name in node php php5 psql python2.7
    do
        alias $name="winpty $name.exe"
    done
    ;;
esac

in /etc/profile.d/aliases.sh? Could you test whether that works okay?

[harriha]

@dscho Seems to work fine based on a quick test, thanks. Looks like a nice workaround, but I guess that doesn't really scale too well? Obviously, if there's no other ways to around this, this is much better than nothing - just should make it very clear (everywhere) that "if your interactive program seems to hang, do this-and-this". Otherwise, and probably even with such notice, there's going to be these kind of issues popping in continuously :).

[dscho]

Otherwise, and probably even with such notice, there's going to be these kind of issues popping in continuously :).

I agree. It is of no use pointing out that we try to support Git here, and not a bazillion of interactive consoles for other software.

BTW can you think of more interactive interpreters than the ones I had listed?

[dscho]

Let's continue the discussion in git-for-windows/build-extra#78