Can a Go program read from the keyboard when stdin is something else?

I have a Go process that accepts input via pipe.

> tail -f something.foo | go run myprog.go

Since stdin is the output of the pipe, I can't find a way to read keyboard input in myprog.go. Is this possible?

I considered executing the tail command inside of myprog.go, but I want to avoid creating another process in the event myprog.go crashes and fails to terminate the other one.

On linux (and POSIX in general), you can open /dev/tty to get the input to the controlling tty for your process.

func readStdin() {
	buf := make([]byte, 1024)
	for {
		n, err := os.Stdin.Read(buf)
		if err != nil && err != io.EOF {
			log.Fatal(err)
		}
		fmt.Print("FROM STDIN:", string(buf[:n]))
		if err == io.EOF {
			return
		}
	}
}
func main() {
	go readStdin()
	buf := make([]byte, 1024)
	tty, err := os.Open("/dev/tty")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer tty.Close()
	for {
		n, err := tty.Read(buf)
		if err != nil && err != io.EOF {
			log.Fatal(err)
		}
		fmt.Print("FROM TTY:", string(buf[:n]))
		if err == io.EOF {
			return
		}
	}
}

Which can output:

$ echo HELLO | ./tty_reader
FROM STDIN:HELLO
typing on my keyboard
FROM TTY:typing on my keyboard

You can use the shell to create a pipe for you to feed input to your program while leaving stdin free for other things. Something to the sound of

go run myprog.go <(tail -f something.foo)

The shell will execute tail and redirect it's stdout to a new fifo. Your program receives the fifo as first argument, pointing to /proc/self/fd/1234567