Free Software

Ion runs the supplied program ensuring that its three standard streams are connected to a tty. Normally this means that the program's stdin, stdout, and stderr will be line-buffered.

Obviously there's not much sense in that when started from the command line. However, there is a scenario when the use of ion becomes necessary. It is when an interactive utility is invoked from another program, which communicates with it via pipes. Unless the invoked utility takes special precautions, its standard streams would become fully buffered, which would make any interactive use meaningless. In this scenario, the calling program is supposed to run ion supplying the utility name and its arguments as its command line parameters. Doing so, the calling program would be able to communicate with the invoked utility just as a human being would via the console.

Registration Date: Sat Mar 9 13:51:42 2013
License: GNU General Public License V3 or later
Development Status: 5 - Production/Stable