NAME
pts —
pseudo-terminal driver
DESCRIPTION
Thepts driver provides support for a device-pair termed
a
pseudo-terminal.
A pseudo-terminal is a pair of character devices, a
master
device and a
slave
device. The slave device provides to a process an interface identical to that
described in tty(4). However, whereas all other devices which provide the interface
described in tty(4) have a hardware device of some sort behind them, the slave
device has, instead, another process manipulating it through the master half
of the pseudo-terminal. That is, anything written on the master device is
given to the slave device as input and anything written on the slave device is
presented as input on the master device.
The following ioctl(2) calls apply only to pseudo-terminals:
TIOCPKT- Enable/disable
packet
mode. Packet mode is enabled by specifying (by reference) a nonzero
parameter and disabled by specifying (by reference) a zero parameter. When
applied to the master side of a pseudo-terminal, each subsequent
read(2) from the terminal will return data written on the slave
part of the pseudo-terminal preceded by a zero byte (symbolically defined
as
TIOCPKT_DATA), or a single byte reflecting control status information. In the latter case, the byte is an inclusive-or of zero or more of the bits:TIOCPKT_FLUSHREAD- whenever the read queue for the terminal is flushed.
TIOCPKT_FLUSHWRITE- whenever the write queue for the terminal is flushed.
TIOCPKT_STOP- whenever output to the terminal is stopped a la
‘
^S’. TIOCPKT_START- whenever output to the terminal is restarted.
TIOCPKT_DOSTOP- whenever
VSTOPis ‘^S’ andVSTARTis ‘^Q’. TIOCPKT_NOSTOP- whenever the start and stop characters are not
‘
^S/^Q’.
While this mode is in use, the presence of control status information to be read from the master side may be detected by a select(2) for exceptional conditions.
This mode is used by rlogin(1) and rlogind(8) to implement a remote-echoed, locally ‘
^S/^Q’ flow-controlled remote login with proper back-flushing of output; it can be used by other similar programs. TIOCGPTN- Obtain device unit number, which can be used to generate the filename of the pseudo-terminal slave device. This ioctl(2) should not be used directly. Instead, the ptsname(3) function should be used.
TIOCPTMASTER- Determine whether the file descriptor is pointing to a pseudo-terminal master device. This ioctl(2) should not be used directly. It is used to implement routines like grantpt(3).
FILES
The files used by this pseudo-terminals implementation are:
- /dev/pts/[num]
- Pseudo-terminal slave devices.
DIAGNOSTICS
None.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
A pseudo-terminal driver appeared in
4.2BSD. In FreeBSD 8.0, it
was replaced with the pts driver.