How to trick an application into thinking its stdout is a terminal, not a pipe

Question

I'm trying to do the opposite of "Detect if stdin is a terminal or pipe?".

I'm running an application that's changing its output format because it detects a pipe on STDOUT, and I want it to think that it's an interactive terminal so that I get the same output when redirecting.

I was thinking that wrapping it in an expect script or using a proc_open() in PHP would do it, but it doesn't.

Any ideas out there?

Answer 1

Aha!

The script command does what we want...

script --return --quiet -c "[executable string]" /dev/null

Does the trick!

Usage:
 script [options] [file]

Make a typescript of a terminal session.

Options:
 -a, --append                  append the output
 -c, --command <command>       run command rather than interactive shell
 -e, --return                  return exit code of the child process
 -f, --flush                   run flush after each write
     --force                   use output file even when it is a link
 -q, --quiet                   be quiet
 -t[<file>], --timing[=<file>] output timing data to stderr or to FILE
 -h, --help                    display this help
 -V, --version                 display version