lpty - PTY control for Lua

What is it?

lpty is a module that allows a program written in lua to open the master side of a PTY and start a program with the slave side of the PTY as its controlling terminal. The PTY may then be read from and written to, thus controlling the remote program.

What's new in Version 1.0

• does not register a global table "lpty" on loading any more, because it is now...
• compatible with lua 5.1 and 5.2
• new exitstatus() method, which can provide information about why a child process terminated
• new flush() method, that removes unwanted data from the pty
• custom environments for processes, and 2 new methods to deal with those
• an option on pty creation time to start child processes using the contents of the PATH environment variable - or not
• the makefile has been made somewhat more usable
• the documentation has received a makeover

What's new in Version 0.9

• PTYs can now be created such that the client side does not echo what the server side sends.
• Error handling has been made to comply with the usual lua way, returning nil+error in case of an error. The old behavious can be reinstated by a switch when creating a pty.
• readok() and sendok() can now take timeout values.
• child process now properly dies when setsid() fails.

Documentation

README

lpty README file

You may also want to read up on how PTYs work by consulting the pty(7) manpage. A more extensive treatment of the matter can be found here

Download

You can get lpty-1.0 by clicking on this link, or by installing it from the luarocks repository. If you fetch it from here, the included README gives hints on how to build it.

License

The lpty module and all accompanying documentation and additional source code is released under the MIT/X11 license.

Copyright (c) 2010 Gunnar Zötl <gz@tset.de>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
	

Contact

If you have anything to say about this, comments, bug reports, whatever, feel free to email them to gz@tset.de