mjhjmtu

I have about 10 php.ini files on my system, located all over the place, and I wanted to quickly browse through them. I tried this command:

locate php.ini | xargs vi

But vi warns me Input is not from a terminal and then the console starts getting really weird - after which I need to press :q! to quit vi and then disconnect from the ssh session and reconnect to have the console behave normally again.

I think that I sort of understand what's happening here - basically the command hasn't finished when vi started so the command maybe hasn't finished and vi doesn't think that the terminal is in normal mode.

I have no idea how to fix it. I have searched Google and also unix.stackexchange.com with poor luck.

I hate xargs, I really wish it'd just die :-)

vi $(locate php.ini)

Note: this will have issues if your file paths have spaces, but it is functionally equivalent to your command.

This next version will properly handle spaces but is a bit more complicated (newlines in file names will still break it though)

(IFS=$'n'; vi $(locate php.ini))

Explanation:

What's happening is that programs inherit their file descriptors from the process that spawned them. xargs has its STDIN connected to the STDOUT of locate, so vi has no clue what the original STDIN really in.

This question has previously been asked on the Super User forum.

Quoting from @grawity's answer on that question:

When you invoke a program via xargs, the program's stdin (standard
input) points to /dev/null. (Since xargs doesn't know the original
stdin, it does the next best thing.)

Vim expects its stdin to be the same as its controlling terminal, and
performs various terminal-related ioctl's on stdin directly. When done
on /dev/null (or any non-tty file descriptor), those ioctls are
meaningless and return ENOTTY, which gets silently ignored.

This is mentioned in the manual pages for xarg.
From OSX/BSD:

-o Reopen stdin as /dev/tty in the child process
before executing the command. This is useful
if you want xargs to run an interactive application.

Hence, on OSX, you could use the following command:

find . -name "php.ini" | xargs -o vim

While, there is no direct switch on the GNU version, this command will work. (Make sure to include the dummy string, otherwise it will drop the first file.)

find . -name "php.ini" | xargs bash -c '</dev/tty vim "$@"' dummy

The above solutions are courtesy Jaime McGuigan on SuperUser. Adding them here for any future visitors searching the site for this error.

A quick way to do it is to use back-ticks (a.k.a. grave accents) to execute a command prior to another command running .

E.g.

vi `find / -type f -name 'php.ini'`

The command contained within the back-ticks will execute first. The output of the contained command is then executed by the command stated before the back-ticks.

For example, in the line above, the find / -type f -name 'php.ini' command will execute first, send output, and then vi will be executed on that output.

Edit multiple php.ini within the same editor ?

Try: vim -o $(locate php.ini)

This error happens when vim is invoked and it's connected to the previous pipeline's output, instead of the terminal and it's receiving different unexpected input (like NULs).
The same happens when you run: vim < /dev/null, so reset command in this case helps. This is explained well by grawity at superuser.

On Unix/OSX you can use xargs with -o parameter, like:

locate php.ini | xargs -o vim

^{-o Reopen stdin as /dev/tty in the child process before executing the command. This is useful if you want xargs to run an interactive application.}

On Linux try the following workaround:

locate php.ini | xargs -J% sh -c 'vim < /dev/tty $@'

Alternatively use GNU parallel instead of xargs to force tty allocation, in example:

locate php.ini | parallel -X --tty vi

^{Note: parallelon Unix/OSX won't work as it has different parameters and it doesn't support tty.}

^{Many other popular commands provides pseudo-tty allocation as well (like -t in ssh), so check for help.}

Alternatively use find to pass file names to edit, so don't need xargs, just use -exec, in example:

find /etc -name php.ini -exec vim +