Not a Typewriter

"In computing, 'Not a typewriter' or ENOTTY is an error code defined in the errno.h found on many Unix systems. This code is now used to indicate that an invalid ioctl (input/output control) number was specified in an ioctl system call." Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_a_typewriter

ERRORS

These are the return values from a Linux ioctl() call:

EBADF fd is not a valid file descriptor.
EFAULT argp references an inaccessible memory area.
EINVAL request or argp is not valid.
ENOTTY fd is not associated with a character special device.
ENOTTY The specified request does not apply to the kind of object that the file descriptor fd references.

Reference: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/ioctl.2.html

Linux Explains All

On Jun 27 Linus Torvalds wrote:

The correct error code for "I don't understand this ioctl" is ENOTTY.
The naming may be odd, but you should think of that error value as a
"unrecognized ioctl number, you're feeding me random numbers that I
don't understand and I assume for historical reasons that you tried to
do some tty operation on me".
...
The EINVAL thing goes way back, and is a disaster. It predates Linux
itself, as far as I can tell. You'll find lots of man-pages that have
this line in it:

  EINVAL Request or argp is not valid.

and it shows up in POSIX etc. And sadly, it generally shows up
_before_ the line that says

  ENOTTY The specified request does not apply to the kind of object
that the descriptor d references.

so a lot of people get to the EINVAL, and never even notice the ENOTTY.
...
At least glibc (and hopefully other C libraries) use a _string_ that
makes much more sense: strerror(ENOTTY) is "Inappropriate ioctl for
device"

Reference: https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/258361/