backticks launching vi causes unexpected issues in vi

The issue seems to be the way our system call works. (Caution: I couldn't escape from vi!)

lewis:jruby pldms$ ruby -e 'system("vi /tmp/vi_test")' # all works as expected
lewis:jruby pldms$ jruby -e 'system("vi /tmp/vi_test")'
Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
... acts very oddly ...

Presumably the IO hookup is the problem, but this may be out of our hands. Trying a pure java test.

yeah, actually, I should have mentioned that - it locked me in vi also. I had to close the terminal window to make my escape.

So this:

import static java.lang.System.err;
import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
public class Test {
	public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
		err.println("We begin");
		Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[] {"vi" , "/tmp/hello"});
		BufferedInputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(process.getInputStream());
		byte[] arr = new byte[300];
		while (is.read(arr,0,300) != -1) {
			err.write(arr);
		}
		err.println(process.exitValue());
	}
}

seems to have the same problem. Hrm.

This looks like a "can't fix" to me. The only available means to launch processes is limited:

The methods that create processes may not work well for special processes on certain native platforms, such as native windowing processes, daemon processes, Win16/DOS processes on Microsoft Windows, or shell scripts. The created subprocess does not have its own terminal or console.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Process.html

Seems we're out of luck here. =/

The only other possibility is a spawn/execve system call via JNA, but I don't know if we'd want to do that all the time.