Ошибка inappropriate ioctl for device

I have a Perl script running in an AIX box.

The script tries to open a file from a certain directory and it fails to read the file because file has no read permission, but I get a different error saying inappropriate ioctl for device.

Shouldn’t it say something like no read permissions for file or something similar?

What does this inappropriate ioctl for device message mean?

How can I fix it?

EDIT: This is what I found when I did strace.

open("/local/logs/xxx/xxxxServer.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND|O_LARGEFILE, 
    0666) = 4 _llseek(4, 0, [77146], SEEK_END) = 0
ioctl(4, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0xbffc14f8) = -1 ENOTTY 
    (Inappropriate ioctl for  device)

Odd errors like «inappropriate ioctl for device» are usually a result of checking $! at some point other than just after a system call failed. If you’d show your code, I bet someone would rapidly point out your error.

«inappropriate ioctl for device» is the error string for the ENOTTY error. It used to be triggerred primarily by attempts to configure terminal properties (e.g. echo mode) on a file descriptor that was no terminal (but, say, a regular file), hence ENOTTY. More generally, it is triggered when doing an ioctl on a device that does not support that ioctl, hence the error string.

To find out what ioctl is being made that fails, and on what file descriptor, run the script under strace/truss. You’ll recognize ENOTTY, followed by the actual printing of the error message. Then find out what file number was used, and what open() call returned that file number.

answered Oct 22, 2009 at 6:06

«files» in *nix type systems are very much an abstract concept.

They can be areas on disk organized by a file system, but they could equally well be a network connection, a bit of shared memory, the buffer output from another process, a screen or a keyboard.

In order for perl to be really useful it mirrors this model very closely, and does not treat files by emulating a magnetic tape as many 4gls do.

So it tried an «IOCTL» operation ‘open for write’ on a file handle which does not allow write operations which is an inappropriate IOCTL operation for that device/file.

The easiest thing to do is stick an » or die 'Cannot open $myfile' statement at the end of you open and you can choose your own meaningful message.

Ran into this error today while trying to use code to delete a folder/files that are living on a Windoze 7 box that’s mounted as a share on a Centos server. Got the inappropriate icotl for device error and tried everything that came to mind. Read just about every post on the net related to this.

Obviously the problem was isolated to the mounted Windoze share on the Linux server. Looked
at the file permissions on the Windoze box and noted the files had their permissions set to read only.

Changed those, went back to the Linux server and all worked as expected. This may not be the solution for most but hopefully it saves someone some time.

answered Mar 10, 2013 at 18:16

I tried the following code that seemed to work:

if(open(my $FILE, "<File.txt")) {
    while(<$FILE>){
    print "$_";}
} else {
    print "File could not be opened or did not existsn";
}

answered Dec 11, 2020 at 8:03

I also get this error «inappropriate ioctl for device» when try to fetch file stat.
It was first time when I got a chance to work on perl script.

my $mtime = (stat("/home/ec2-user/sample/test/status.xml"))[9]

Above code snippet was throwing error. Perl script was written in version 5.12 on Windows, and I have to run it on amazon linux having perl 5.15.

In my case error was because of Array index out of bond ( In java language sense).

When I modified code my $var = (stat("/home/ec2-user/sample/test/status.xml"))[0][9]; error gone and I get correct value.

Of course, it is too late to answer, but I am posting my finding so that it can be helpful for developer community.
If some perl expert can verify this, it will be great..

answered Jun 14, 2022 at 14:16

When using this snippet (inline shell provisioner):

config.vm.provision "shell" do |s|
  s.inline = <<-SHELL
    <shell code>
  SHELL
end

it results in:

==> default: mesg: 
==> default: ttyname failed
==> default: : 
==> default: Inappropriate ioctl for device

It looks like that other people have found this issue as well. Does anybody know how to solve it?

asked Dec 25, 2016 at 9:43

What versions of Vagrant and VirtualBox are you using?

I was facing this issue yesterday when using Vagrant 1.8.5 with VirtualBox 5.1.4 (with Ubunty 16.04). However, after I upgraded to Vagrant 1.9.2 and VirtualBox 5.1.14 today, the issue went away.

Note that, prior to upgrading, as @Minister also mentioned, the script executed without issue. It was just outputting that «ttyname failed» message, which gave the impression that an error occurred, when actually the provisioning script executed successfully.

answered Mar 7, 2017 at 21:31

I had this issue start happening in a Vagrant installation that I had been using for years and had upgraded from time to time as well. I upgraded to the latest Vagrant ( 1.9.1 -> 2.0.3 ) and the problem went away. ( it also eliminated some other quirky things as well that had crept into its operation )

Not sure if it was the new version that fixed it or that existing files/configs were freshened in the upgrade process or a combination of the two.

answered Apr 3, 2018 at 14:24

Seems like it only works in VirtualBox v6.0.2 for Mojave/Catalina! (+vagrant 2.2.2 — not sure it matters though!)

EDIT:

This fixed it for me now in your host Mac:

vagrant halt
sudo ifconfig vboxnet0 down
sudo ifconfig vboxnet0 up
vagrant up

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/1941#issuecomment-42274573

answered Oct 8, 2019 at 12:09

This means that the driver does not support the IOCTL that setserial is using:

setserial gets the information via an ioctl() call. In case the driver 
for your device does not support TIOCGSERIAL, the "invalid argument" is 
returned.

(Debian bug report)

I think stty should be able to perform any configuration you need for a USB-Serial device.

answered Nov 30, 2016 at 20:37