Shell Programming and Scripting

You are not connecting to a tty. Somewhere you are assuming that you are connected to a tty and doing something that only works with a tty.

I do not see a problem with that function. Since your first function seems to work, it is more probable that the error is there. My guess is that the function you posted is never even invoked. After the first function sorts your file, what else does it do? What happens between the first function call and the second function call? Does any module include termio.h or termios.h? Anything requiring them could be the problem. And you of course have searched for an explicit call to ioctl(), right?

another possibility is....... is 'sort' what you think it is? Is it a possibility that there's another 'sort' in your $PATH that preceeds say '/bin/sort'?

I checked the code and there is no place i am connecting to tty. Though many functions are there to fprintf writing to stderr.

I am not using ioctl function anywhere. neither i used termio.h or termios.h.

To answer vergesh question, i double checked for path invoking anothe sort. So there is no possibility this could be a reason.

I will like to go with Perderabo statment that somewhere before itself the errno is getting reset to some error value and when during the call to function sortTempInputfile we first trap to check errno we exit.

Please let me know if there exists any other reasons for ioctl error thrown by unix?

regards
Rishi

Only reason is an inappropriate ioctl call. Since you can't change anything to debug this, there is nothing further I can suggest. You will just have to live it I guess.

Only when I issued "/bin/bash < SCRIPTFILE" to execute the scriptfile will I get error message "stty: standard input: Inappropriate ioctl for device". Whereas, when I "chmod" the scriptfile to a executable one and executed it, error message disappered and scriptfile was executed successful.

Any link between these two problems?