First, thanks to everyone who responded--I appreciate it greatly.
To recap the question: I was doing dumps from the crontab, and they
were getting aborted with the error "Cannot open /dev/tty". The
basic thrust of the answers were:
1) If it's trying to open /dev/tty, that means there's a problem
I need to deal with. Look carefully at the output of the dump
and at /var/adm/messages to see if there's anything going wrong.
(I couldn't see any problems, and the dump ran fine when started
manually). Several people said that they did dumps out of cron
every day without hitting this problem.
2) Use expect, available as ftp.cme.nist.gov:/pub/expect/expect.tar.Z.
Expect is designed to provide a psuedo-tty so that you can batch
command like dump that want to be able to talk to the tty.
I also had one person suggest I grab the sources for dump off of
ftp.cs.berkeley.edu and hack it so it doesn't need /dev/tty anymore
(and isn't it time someone fixed dump anyway?) but I felt that was
overkill, at least for my situation.
Thanks to:
sdr@rdga3.att.com (S. D. Raffensberger 500622500 (RD))
bismark@alta.jpl.nasa.gov (Bismark Espinoza)
pyrczaks@mace1.afsc.noaa.gov (Steve Pryczak)
kannan@catarina.usc.edu
Ian MacPhedran <macphed@dvinci.usask.ca>
Patrick L. Nolan <pln@egret1.Stanford.EDU>
Lupe Christoph <lupe@alanya.m.isar.de>
mike@trdlnk.com (Michael Sullivan)
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