it you have a program that calls isatty(0) from the MSys rxvt terminal, the result is that it says it is not talking a terminal.
This makes it hard to use terminal apps from the rxvt command line.
This feature has been known for a long time. Considerable futile effort has been expended on trying to fix it; we will not pursue it further.
Since the formal release of MSYS-1.0.11, IIRC, we have recommended against using rxvt as a terminal emulator for MSYS; you should use a standard Windows console, or Console2, (a separate SF hosted project), instead. The maintainer of rxvt, (for both MSYS and Cygwin), is on record recently on the MinGW-dvlpr list, stating that "rxvt *must* die" on both platforms.
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This feature has been known for a long time. Considerable futile effort has been expended on trying to fix it; we will not pursue it further.
Since the formal release of MSYS-1.0.11, IIRC, we have recommended against using rxvt as a terminal emulator for MSYS; you should use a standard Windows console, or Console2, (a separate SF hosted project), instead. The maintainer of rxvt, (for both MSYS and Cygwin), is on record recently on the MinGW-dvlpr list, stating that "rxvt *must* die" on both platforms.