How do I detect whether sys.stdout is attached to terminal or not?
Question:
Is there a way to detect whether sys.stdout
is attached to a console terminal or not? For example, I want to be able to detect if foo.py is run via:
$ python foo.py # user types this on console
OR
$ python foo.py > output.txt # redirection
$ python foo.py | grep .... # pipe
The reason I ask this question is that I want to make sure that my progressbar display happens only in the former case (real console).
Answers:
This can be detected using isatty
:
if sys.stdout.isatty():
# You're running in a real terminal
else:
# You're being piped or redirected
To demonstrate this in a shell:
python -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.isatty())"
should write True
python -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.isatty())" | cat
should write False
Is there a way to detect whether sys.stdout
is attached to a console terminal or not? For example, I want to be able to detect if foo.py is run via:
$ python foo.py # user types this on console
OR
$ python foo.py > output.txt # redirection
$ python foo.py | grep .... # pipe
The reason I ask this question is that I want to make sure that my progressbar display happens only in the former case (real console).
This can be detected using isatty
:
if sys.stdout.isatty():
# You're running in a real terminal
else:
# You're being piped or redirected
To demonstrate this in a shell:
python -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.isatty())"
should write Truepython -c "import sys; print(sys.stdout.isatty())" | cat
should write False