SCP not working - gives "stdin: is not a tty"

**becatlibra** · August 21st, 2008

I have googled this for a while and found inconclusive answers. The general consensus is that if it works, who cares. . .

This 'used' to work for me even with this message. But now it does not function.

My syntax is simply

scp filename root@server.com:/home/user/

and then I get the error

stdin: is not a tty

and nothing is copied.

Please help if you can.

**HalPomeranz** · August 22nd, 2008

I've seen this error when your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc on the remote machine ("server.com" in your example) has a stty statement in it. stty should only be used on interactive shells, and your scp session doesn't qualify.

The usual work-around is to prefix the stty statement with a conditional so that the stty is only executed in an interactive shell. A typical idiom is:

Code:

[ "$PS1" ] && stty intr '^C' kill '^U' erase '^H' echoe

The stty command will only run if the first part of the expression above evaluates to true. The environment variable $PS1 is only set if this is an interactive shell.

**becatlibra** · August 22nd, 2008

I had read this on the internet . . . I checked earlier both .bashrc and .bash_profile (and also /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile) and none of them have stty in them.

I am (for the hell of it) grepping the whole of both machines for the pattern stty - although I doubt this will help. Any further suggestions from anyone?

Thanks

**eldragon** · August 22nd, 2008

maybe instead of allowing root to ssh, use a regular user

if you are trying to copy something inside the user's home do

Code:

scp filename user@server.com:path/inside/home_dir

it will copy to

Code:

/home/user/path/inside/home_dir/

**HalPomeranz** · August 22nd, 2008

Originally Posted by becatlibra

I had read this on the internet . . . I checked earlier both .bashrc and .bash_profile (and also /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile) and none of them have stty in them.

I am (for the hell of it) grepping the whole of both machines for the pattern stty - although I doubt this will help. Any further suggestions from anyone?

It could be another interactive command besides stty that's trying to execute from one of your start-up files and display output, etc. You might try temporarily moving your start-up files on "server.com" out of the way and then doing the scp. If the error goes away, you'll know that there's some issue with one of the start-up files. Then add them back one-by-one until the error re-appears and you'll be able to narrow down the file that's causing the problem.

**matey3** · January 21st, 2009

I have this same problem and I think it is some sort of faulty installation of Ubuntu.
I have done all the updates etc, to no avail!

This is xen machine with problem, when I ssh to it as root I get the tty error and I have to close the terminal (I am using GUI) it freezes no ctl c out of.
When I go into the faulty machine and ssh to my workstation, I get a different error:

Code:

PRNG is not seeded

I dont know what PRNG is?
Any ideas?

**matey3** · January 21st, 2009

PARTIALLY SOLVED!

I got some ideas by looking here;
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/.../msg00285.html

I used MAKEDEV under /dev to manually make those tty#s which did not exist? (why they weren't there? I dont know?) MAKEDEV tty1 or 0 or 2 whatever...
then I ran
apt-get install udev
that updated all my c/cpp libs.
also as they suggested I put those 2 lines in my startup which the 2nd one was already there so I got a warning msg.
update-rc.d -f udev start 03 S

Now I can ssh to it no problems and I am sure you can scp as well.
I am still having this error though at the boot up:
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console

this goes on until I break out of it?!