如何使在一个终端中运行的程序的输出成为另一终端的输入？

Question

NOTE: The problem is based on GUI program, so ordinary pipe won't work, I need keep both program running.

Preparation: In Redhat or Ubuntu, two gnome-terminal opened, terminal A is running a script program, which can generate some string output; terminal B is running another program, which is waiting user input.

Goal: Make the output of the terminal A/program be the input of Terminal B automatically.

The main challenge point is that, the program running in terminal B is beyond my control, it can only take some kind of specific user inputs via keyboard, I can not type any other pipe command while running it. Also, program B need some time to handle the command passed from program A, so if I have more than one command I need to keep both program RUNNING, but not like ordinary pipe: A generate series of command and terminated itself, all commands would be passed to B at the same time, B get input and response. If all commands come at the same time, B can only make response to the first one and ignore the rest.

Till now I have to copy the first program output and paste it into terminal B, is there any clever way to do link two terminal and make this operation automatically?

Answer 1

In one way, I recommend changing the way to connect these terminals.

Or, you could try /dev/tty file.

/dev/tty is a special file, representing the terminal for the current process. So, when you echo 1 > /dev/tty, your message ('1') will appear on your screen. Likewise, when you cat /dev/tty, your subsequent input gets duplicated (until you press Ctrl-C).

/dev/tty doesn't 'contain' anything as such, but you can read from it and write to it (for what it's worth). I can't think of a good use for it, but there are similar files which are very useful for simple IO operations (eg /dev/ttyS0 is normally your serial port)

It does make your command to pass to the terminals, but I am not sure you could exec them with this way.