[sane-devel] Calling plain"scanimage" results bad user experience

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

I was informed that calling plain "scanimage" as command
from a terminal results a bad user experience because
one gets the scanner's image bytes spit out in the terminal.

When I reproduced it, I got my scanner's data bytes
spit out on my xterm which results an unusable xterm
which does no longer accept any input so that I could
only kill the xterm. First it looked as if scanimage
was still running but could not be stopped with Ctrl+C
(or any other kind of keyboard interrupt) but actually
it was my xterm which was messed up by my scanner's
binary data.

I know that it is described in "man scanimage"
-------------------------------------------------------------
      To scan with default settings to the file image.pnm:
          scanimage >image.pnm
-------------------------------------------------------------

Nevertheless I wonder if it is possible to provide a
more user friendly behavoiur when called on the commandline
without breaking its usage as described in "man scanimage".

For example by calling something like "isatty" to check
if stdout is connected to a terminal.

What do you think?


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
-- 
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany
AG Nuernberg, HRB 16746, GF: Markus Rex