freebsd-update from script without tty

[John Nielsen]

Hi Colin, list-

I have a script that builds virtual FreeBSD disk images. After it populates the base system it runs "freebsd-update -b ${MOUNTPOINT} ..." to update the image with the latest security patch release.

If I run the script from a terminal it works fine. However if I try to run it from our user-friendly web interface (which spawns the script in the background with no tty) the freebsd-update step fails:

# UNAME_r=10.0-RELEASE freebsd-update -b /mnt/chroot fetch
freebsd-update fetch should not be run non-interactively.
Run freebsd-update cron instead.

I understand and appreciate the use case for 'freebsd-update cron' but in this case my script is running because a user requested and is waiting for it, and a delay of up to an hour won't really fly.

Can anyone suggest a workaround?

Thanks,

JN