Cannot Launch Interactive Program While Piping to Script in Python

Question

I have a python script that needs to call the defined $EDITOR or $VISUAL. When the Python script is called alone, I am able to launch the $ED

Answer 1

The specific case of find -type f | vidir - is handled here:

foreach my $item (@ARGV) {
    if ($item eq "-") {
        push @dir, map { chomp; $_ } ;
        close STDIN;
        open(STDIN, "/dev/tty") || die "reopen: $!\n";
    }

You can re-create this behavior in Python, as well:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import sys

sys.stdin.close()
o = os.open("/dev/tty", os.O_RDONLY)
os.dup2(o, 0)
os.system('vim')

Of course, it closes the standard input file descriptor, so if you intend on reading from it again after starting the editor, you should probably duplicate its file descriptor before closing it.