How to solve `ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device` in Vagrant?

1) open /root/.profile

2) remove the offensive line

3) replace it with:

tty -s && mesg n

Happy linuxing and a merry new year.

George Hart, LSU

It looks like this is caused by an interaction between the default vagrant configuration of config.ssh.shell to be bash -l (which simulates a login shell, thus processing login-related configuration files such as .profile) with a line in the /root/.profile file on at least some distributions of Linux (including, e.g., the one in the ubuntu/xenial64 vagrant box), which has:

mesg n || true

A better option for this line in that file would probably be to have it say:

test -t 0 && mesg n

... and, given that that's hard to change as an individual vagrant user, a more immediate solution is to drop the -l option from the vagrant configuration, e.g. with (within Vagrantfile):

config.ssh.shell="bash"

(Caveat: It's conceivable that this change could have potentially-negative side effects. It seemed to work great for me, though, with some basic shell provisioners, e.g. with apt-get update, and so forth.)

I noticed that even this message was shown as an error (in RED colour), the script was executed successfully! A few days later I saw a possible fix and I posted an answer on SO. The "fix" is:

# Prevent TTY Errors (copied from laravel/homestead: "homestead.rb" file)... By default this is "bash -l".
config.ssh.shell = "bash -c 'BASH_ENV=/etc/profile exec bash'"

Maybe you just don't need it, but you can try it and use it if it works for you.

As you can see in the commented line above - the "mesg: ttyname failed Inappropriate ioctl for device" has been prevented from the laravel team. Thanks for this one!

Most developers would like to avoid errors/warnings when we do development, so it seems like the fix (a possible fix) we needed.

Important note: I haven't tested this solution too much, but the box starts without the "mesg: ttyname failed Inappropriate ioctl for device" error! You are free to try it and if you experience any problems, just drop a comment to save somebody else's time!