Small tools to interact in Virtual Terminals (eg. /dev/ttyXY or /dev/ptyXY) in an easy way.
Why? If a program uses a TTY device for command input and output it's hard to send commands to it. Sending output directly to a TTY with, for instance, echo "text" > /dev/ttyXY does not magically make it input of that TTY. You may use conspy however that's an interactive program not suitable for bash scripts. The following tools aim to solve those problems.
1. writevt: based on ioctl and mostly ripped off of from the good old console-tools' writevt.c.
Compilation/Usage:
gcc writevt.c -o writevt
./writevt /dev/ttyXY text
2. tiocsti: another ioctl-based tool capable of using pipped data from stdin.
Compilation/Usage:
gcc tiocsti.c -o tiocsti
echo "text" | ./tiocsti > /dev/ttyXY
Please note: the usual way to receive commands in a program is to create a listening socket, not to hijack a TTY device. It works, but it's not really "best practice". Don't build new programs that do this.
Enjoy.