Launch interactive app from script

Question

I have an application built in C that uses fgets to read user commands from stdin. I want my embedded linux system to launch this application on startup, and put the user in the terminal of this application.

I can launch the application on startup using a bash script:

./my_app

but the application does not seem to be getting stdin from the user terminal.

If I wait to log in to linux, and then launch the application manually from the terminal, I can interact with it just fine.

Is there any way to launch the program automatically (such as with a startup script) but then pass over control to the user, as if the user had launched the program themself?

Answer 1

I found what I was looking for:

exec ./my_app

replaces the normal linux terminal with the application. The downside is that you cannot Ctrl + C back out into Linux, but that's not important for me, so this gets the job done.