In general, a test which gets its input piped in is not really interacting with a terminal like it normally would. Thus, letting it think it has the same terminal as the environment is incorrect. More specifically, hphpd uses Readline, which inspects the TERM env var and based on that and a stunning array of other options will attempt to initialize the terminal with extra control characters on first use. It would be tough to try to control for all of the different options and ensure they're all the same, and honestly testing Readline is not the objective of our tests anyway. Thus, I'm forcing TERM to 'dumb' when a test has input to ensure a) a simple terminal which requires no control characters and b) consistency no matter what environment is present when the tests are run.
Mike Magruder