Is there a cross-platform way to check if stdout is being piped into another program in Rust?

Question

I'd like to disable colors when the output is piped somewhere else than a terminal.

To rephrase this: you want to check whether `stdout` is a TTY. You might want to check the `isatty` function or a crate wrapping it for compatibility, eg. https://crates.io/crates/atty. — SirDarius, Jan 02 '19 at 22:15

Nickolay · Accepted Answer · 2021-11-15T20:30:25.917

12

Translated into the POSIX language, your question would be: "is stdout not a TTY", so the answer on *nix can be obtained by !isatty(STDOUT_FILENO). The libc crate can be used to call this from Rust.

On Windows, it's complicated, so you're better off using the atty crate.

[edit] You can use the atty crate on Linux as well, making it a convenient solution for cross-platform programs.

edited Nov 15 '21 at 20:30

answered Jan 29 '19 at 11:31

Nickolay

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Is there any reason to go via `libc`? The atty crate is cross-platform. – Peter Hall Jan 29 '19 at 13:19
The only reason I can think of is avoiding an extra dependency, while not needing to be cross-platform. – Nickolay Jan 29 '19 at 13:34
just tried atty on linux and it works flawlessly – zertyz Nov 15 '21 at 12:35

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 25 '23 at 18:24

3

As of Rust 1.70, this is in std:

use std::io::IsTerminal;

fn main() {
    dbg!(std::io::stdout().is_terminal());
}

Alternatively, crossterm has a is_tty() method, and there's also the is-terminal crate (a maintained fork of atty).

answered Aug 25 '23 at 18:24

Wilfred Hughes

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Is there a cross-platform way to check if stdout is being piped into another program in Rust?

2 Answers2

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