Echoing to $(tty) in a backgrounded process

Question

Why does this not print anything?

bash -c '(while echo "not printing" ; do sleep 1; done) > "$(tty)" & sleep 10'

Even though this, for example, does:

bash -c '(while echo "is printing" ; do sleep 1; done) > "$(tty)" && true'

Answer 1

Let's take your first command, and run it in a temporary directory:

mkdir eg1    # Create temporary directory
cd eg1       # ...and change to it
ls           # No output (obviously, no files)

bash -c '(while echo "not printing" ; do sleep 1; done) > "$(tty)" & sleep 10'

But now take a look in the directory:

ls -l
-rw-r--r--+ 1 roaima roaima 1040 Jun  6 23:05 not a tty

What has happened here is that the tty command reports the terminal device such as /dev/pty0 when it's executed with a terminal attached, and the message not a tty otherwise. When it's run in the background (&) as a subshell (( … )) there is no terminal device, so output is redirected to what happens to be a file called not a tty.

Now in the second case everything is very similar except that the subshell is not being executed in the background:

bash -c '(while echo "is printing" ; do sleep 1; done) > "$(tty)" && true'

In this instance tty is running in the foreground and can return the device name of the current terminal, so you see the output on your screen.

Notice that the && is a logical connector such that the second command will only run if the first returns a "successful" (0-valued) exit status. Do not confuse it with &, which instructs the preceding command to run independently in the background:

# Run the ( ... ) in the background concurrently with the foreground process
( sleep 1; echo background ) & echo foreground; wait

[1] 32301
foreground
background
[1]+  Done                    ( sleep 1; echo background )

# Run the ( ... ) and then if it's successful execute the next statement
( sleep 1; echo background ) && echo foreground; wait

background
foreground

Depending on what you want to achieve you might want to consider using /dev/tty, or even not redirecting the output at all.