how to get rid of pty?

[stsp]

It seems, sudo have switched
to using pty by default. This
breaks old programs that use
console ioctls (VT_xx, KD_xx etc).

How to recover such programs?
I can think of 2 ways:
Either add an option to sudo
to disable pty - that will be
backward-compatible.
Or save the original tty name
to some variable ("SUDO_TTY")
so that the program can at
least find it there and re-open.

[millert]

There is already a sudoers option to disable this. You can just add the following to your sudoers file:

Defaults !use_pty

You can also set this on a per-command basis if you want. I don't intend to add a sudo command line option to control this but I wouldn't object to adding a SUDO_TTY environment variable.

[stsp]

Ok, please add SUDO_TTY.
There are lots of other sudo
vars to parse already, so
why not another one. :)

[millert]

Closing now that sudo sets SUDO_TTY to the invoking user's terminal.

[stsp]

Thank you.