"the input device is not a TTY" error running docker on VSTS build agent

I have been playing around with including all my build dependencies in docker for windows lately and had a build that kept giving me this error in the build log:

“the input device is not a TTY. If you are using mintty, try prefixing the command with ‘winpty’”

The command I had been running was along the lines of:

docker exec -it powershell.exe ./some/script.ps1

The problem was that I was using -it which means “interactive” and “create a virtual TTY”, to run my script I needed neither of those so took them off. The command then failed and I could see the actual error message which allowed me to find the real problem, instead of seeing a message about the TTY because the docker exec command failed for some other reason (container not running, powershellexe instead of powershell.exe lol).

Anyone hope it helps someone, if you get this error then the root cause is something else, and you don’t need -it on docker exec when you run exec a script in a docker container as part of a build.