Capturing file descriptor 3, or alternatives.

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Bill Freeman <ke1g.nh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was suggesting the possibility that an existing tool might
>> help you by somehow interacting with the user via some channel
>>> other than stdout and then uttering the results back to the
>>> parent shell via stdout,
>
> Ah, well, there is no channel other than the tty.

  A tty provides two output channels, stdout and stderr.
Additionally, in some scenarios, one can go outside the standard I/O
streams and grab the tty directly.  MOD's suggestion may still be
useful.

  It may help if you tell us something about the environment.  Linux
only?  Other *nixes?  Versions?  PC console?  xterm?  SSH?  Serial
line to VT-100?

  It may help if you tell us about what you're trying to get out of
this interaction with the user.  I understand if this is for $WORK
some details may be hush-hush, but if you can genericize it, it might
help give us some context.  E.g.:

	I have to prompt the user for a hostname and an IP address.
	The hostname entered may or may not be fully-qualified, so
	I have to figure that out, and qualify it if needed.  I
	also need to do basic syntactic validity checking.  Then
	I need to set $IPADDR and $NAME in the shell.

-- Ben