But I guess what you are saying is that under *nix, the standard CRT input routines don't provided line editing facilities, unless the program in question uses a readline(3) library or similar.

Essentially yes.   stdin is just a file handle like any other, which by itself is unfiltered / binary-clean. Any other behavior you may observe (typically with interactive sessions) is the result of other layers that sit in between stdin and the user/keyboard, most prominently a tty and (optionally) some readline library.

When stdin is connected to a regular pipe for non-interactive communication, those layers are not involved, unless things have explicitly been programmed that way (as with tools like Expect or similar) — this of course can be done, but usually isn't.

In reply to Re^5: Testing for a background process waiting for input (use a thread) by Eliya
in thread Testing for a background process waiting for input by SBECK

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