How to execute an interactive application from Ant build script?

Question

From http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/exec.html :

Note that you cannot interact with the forked program, the only way to send input to it is via the input and inputstring attributes. Also note that since Ant 1.6, any attempt to read input in the forked program will receive an EOF (-1). This is a change from Ant 1.5, where such an attempt would block.

How do I launch and interact with interactive console program from ant?

What I want to do is similar to drush sqlc functionality, that is launch the mysql client interpreter using the proper database credentials, but not limited to this use case.

Here's a sample use case:

<project name="mysql">
  <target name="mysql">
    <exec executable="mysql">
      <arg line="-uroot -p"/>
    </exec>
  </target>
</project>

When run using ant :

$ ant -f mysql.xml mysql
Buildfile: /home/ceefour/tmp/mysql.xml

mysql:
Enter password:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

After inputting password, it immediately exits.

Compare this with what happens when executing directly on the shell (expected behavior):

$ mysql -uroot -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1122
Server version: 5.1.58-1ubuntu1 (Ubuntu)

Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql>

Answer 1

You can launch your command via a shell, redirecting standard input/output/error from/to/to /dev/tty, which corresponds to the controlling terminal of the process.

<target name="dbshell" description="Open a shell for interactive tasks">
  <exec executable="/bin/sh">
    <arg value="-c"/>
    <arg value="mysql -u root -p &lt; /dev/tty &gt; /dev/tty 2&gt; /dev/tty"/>
  </exec>
</target>