From what I know, sys.stdout is a file that represents the stdout of a terminal. However, when I try to use sys.stdout.seek, whatever parameters I give it, it throws an error:
IOError: [Errno 29] Illegal seek
What's going on? Is it the fact that I'm using the TTY itself and not a virtual terminal like xterm? How can I resolve this?
When stdout is a TTY it's a character device and it's not seekable, you cannot seek in a TTY. Same for tell, it's not implemented:
>>> sys.stdout.tell()
IOError: [Errno 29] Illegal seek
However, when you redirect standard streams to a file for example in a shell:
$ my program > ouput.txt
Now you can seek from stdout, stdout now is a file.
Please look at this reference if you're working with Unix:
Understanding character device (or character special) files.