I have tried the following with both LinuxMint 13 Cinnamon 32 bit and Trisquel 7.0 Gnome 32 bit and get the same error message:
$ yes | sudo e2fsck /dev/sdax
e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
e2fsck: need terminal for interactive repairs
In each case, the partition /dev/sdax was not mounted.
Is it not possible to use yes with e2fsck?
yes - output a string repeatedly until killed
what is the reason to use it here?yes
with it? Maybe, but you don't need to: it already has a-y
option that does the same thing.