How do i get less or more to recognize keystrokes when piping from a cli php script?

Question

I want to be able to use the arrow keys when i pipe output from a php cli script into less. At the moment php cli does something to the tty which can only be fixed when you execute

!stty sane

from within less, which is a right pain!

I found a reference to this problem @ http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php#90743 but i can't seem to find an answer :-)

Any help is appreciated, although this problem ranks far below many other problems ;-)

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 03 '11 at 01:18

8

I've been searching for some tweakable to do exactly this. Right now my best workaround is:

php blah.php </dev/null | less

which has the desired effect, but is a pita to have to type. It seems that when the PHP CLI detects stdin is a tty, it puts that tty into linemode.

answered Apr 03 '11 at 01:18

Chris

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I think this a very acceptable solution since, although it's a pita, it's also easy to remember :-) – Michiel May 20 '11 at 09:14
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Couldn't you just do `php < blah.php | less` for the same effect? – kojiro May 31 '13 at 11:43

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '11 at 22:29

2

If you add exec('stty cbreak'); to your cli script, it fixes this. (At least, it does for me, modifying drush.php for this.)

answered Jun 19 '11 at 22:29

PJ Eby

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Only saw this answer just now - it looks like just the thing i'm looking for - Thanks! – Michiel Aug 24 '11 at 08:20
I added a few more details here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/20341430/943279 It might be a PHP bug, and I included my version info for where I had issues and where I didn't in case it really is a PHP bug. – Matthew Kolb Dec 03 '13 at 01:57

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 24 '16 at 23:54

0

Another options that's slightly more readable (to me) is:

less -f <(php whatevz.php)

This is also useful when trying to pipe the output of PHP's info flag:

less -f <(php -i)

answered Feb 24 '16 at 23:54

Scott Buchanan

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How do i get less or more to recognize keystrokes when piping from a cli php script?

3 Answers3