2015-09-18 Emacs and TTY

I’m connecting to Kallobombus via SSH. It runs Debian 7.9 aka Wheezy. Recently a new problem appeared. I can no longer use Emacs unless I’m root.

Kallobombus

alex@kallobombus:~$ emacs
emacs: Could not open file: /dev/tty
alex@kallobombus:~$ sudo emacs
alex@kallobombus:~$ ls -l /dev/tty
crw------- 1 root root 5, 0 Sep 18 08:28 /dev/tty
alex@kallobombus:~$ cat /etc/debian_version
7.9
alex@kallobombus:~$ which emacs
/usr/bin/emacs

What’s the problem?

On a different server, running Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS:

kensanata@po6:~$ cat /etc/debian_version
jessie/sid
kensanata@po6:~$ ls -l /dev/tty
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 Sep 15 11:42 /dev/tty
kensanata@po6:~$ emacs

So, is the solution to `chmod o+rw /dev/tty`?

Oh well, I ran `sudo chmod go+rw /dev/tty` and that seemed to fix the problem. I just hope it didn’t create any security issues.

​#Emacs ​#Software

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

⁂

I just had the same problem on Debian 8.8 (jessie). Thanks!

– Christian Weiske 2017-07-13 20:21 UTC

Christian Weiske