Andreas Buening <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Paul Eggert wrote: >> Perhaps we could make "exec </dev/null" an option, normally enabled, > > I'm sorry, I didn't follow this discussion closely. If I understand the > shell docs correctly this command redirects stdin to /dev/null for all > further lines of configure.
Yes. > Why would anybody want this? Because in practice, it's too common for "configure" tests to attempt to read standard input even when this wasn't intended. I guess that this happens far more often than "configure" tests that are actually intended to read standard input. "configure" is normally designed to run standalone, without any user intervention. Asking for user input is much more of a pain for installers to automate; I can't recommend the practice, even though I now see that one package is doing it that way.
