kubectl exec fails with the error "Unable to use a TTY - input is not a terminal or the right kind of file"

Question

I am running a jenkins pipeline with the following command:

kubectl exec -it kafkacat-5f8fcfcc57-2txhc -- kafkacat -b cord-kafka -C -t BBSim-OLT-0-Events -o s@1585031458

which is running fine on the terminal of the machine the pipeline is running on, but on the actual pipeline I get the following error: "Unable to use a TTY - input is not a terminal or the right kind of file"

Any tips on how to go about resolving this?

See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/43099210/596285 (these flags are a mirror of the docker flags) — BMitch, Jul 23 '20 at 13:36

4F2E4A2E · Answer 1 · 2021-12-30T18:18:38.320

40

For windows git bash:

alias kubectl='winpty kubectl'
$ kubectl exec -it <container>

Or just use winpty before the desired command.

edited Dec 30 '21 at 18:18

answered Jun 28 '21 at 12:55

4F2E4A2E

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this is the ANSWER! it works on my win10 – ERJAN Jan 26 '22 at 09:35
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This worked on Windows 10 – sidharth vijayakumar May 21 '22 at 09:45

foo0x29a · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-24T07:16:36.287

When the flags -it are used with kubectl exec, it enables the TTY interactive mode. Given the error that you mentioned, it seems that Jenkins doesn't allocate a TTY.

Since you are running the command in a Jenkins job, I would assume that your command is not necessarily interactive. A possible solution for the problem would be to simply remove the -t flag and try to execute the following instead:

kubectl exec -i kafkacat-5f8fcfcc57-2txhc -- kafkacat -b cord-kafka -C -t BBSim-OLT-0-Events -o s@1585031458

score 30 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 23 '20 at 13:25

30

For Windows GitBash users, use Powershell and NOT GitBash

answered Jul 23 '20 at 13:25

Ryan Augustine

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Is there any possibility to configure GitBash to act like Powershell does? Thank you. – Marco Aug 07 '20 at 15:58
See answer below for doing this with gitbash https://stackoverflow.com/a/68163722/131391 – aland Apr 07 '22 at 20:40

score 9 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 24 '20 at 07:09

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Remove the -t option. That requests a TTY, which as you noted does not exist in Jenkins.

answered Mar 24 '20 at 07:09

coderanger

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-i still fails, see here: kubectl exec --namespace default -i svc/jenkins -c jenkins -- /bin/cat /run/secrets/chart-admin-password && echo OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: container_linux.go:370: starting container process caused: exec: "C:/Program Files/Git/usr/bin/cat": stat C:/Program Files/Git/usr/bin/cat: no such file or directory: unknown command terminated with exit code 126 – joe hoeller Dec 29 '20 at 18:15

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 06 '22 at 11:46

Just a hint for anyone that gets stuck like I did with kafkacat suddenly returning no data after removing the -t.

Turns out if there's no tty then kafkacat defaults to Producer mode, I never used the -C flag because it's the default to be a Consumer, but in this case it's required.

kubectl exec fails with the error "Unable to use a TTY - input is not a terminal or the right kind of file"

5 Answers5

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