pts(7D)

NAME

     pts - STREAMS pseudo-tty slave driver

DESCRIPTION

     The pseudo-tty subsystem simulates  a  terminal  connection,
     where  the master side represents the terminal and the slave
     represents the user process's special device end  point.  In
     order to use the pseudo-tty subsystem, a node for the master
     side driver /dev/ptmx and N nodes for the slave driver (N is
     determined  at  installation  time)  must  be installed. The
     names of the slave devices are /dev/pts/M where  M  has  the
     values  0 through N-1. When the master device is opened, the
     corresponding slave device is automatically locked  out.  No
     user  may  open  that slave device until its permissions are
     adjusted  and  the  device  unlocked  by  calling  functions
     grantpt(3C)  and  unlockpt(3C). The user can then invoke the
     open system call with the  name  that  is  returned  by  the
     ptsname(3C) function. See the example below.

     Only one open is allowed on a master device. Multiple  opens
     are  allowed  on the slave device. After both the master and
     slave have been opened, the user has  two  file  descriptors
     which are end points of a full duplex connection composed of
     two streams automatically connected at the master and  slave
     drivers.  The user may then push modules onto either side of
     the stream pair. The user needs to  push  the  ptem(7M)  and
     ldterm(7M)  modules  onto  the  slave  side  of  the pseudo-
     terminal subsystem to get terminal semantics.

     The master and slave drivers  pass  all  messages  to  their
     adjacent  queues.   Only  the M_FLUSH needs some processing.
     Because the read queue of one side is connected to the write
     queue of the other, the FLUSHR flag is changed to the FLUSHW
     flag and vice versa.  When the master device  is  closed  an
     M_HANGUP  message  is  sent  to  the slave device which will
     render the device unusable. The process on  the  slave  side
     gets  the  errno EIO when attempting to write on that stream
     but it will be able to read any data remaining on the stream
     head  read  queue.  When  all  the  data has been read, read
     returns 0 indicating that the stream can no longer be  used.
     On the last close of the slave device, a 0-length message is
     sent to the master device.  When the application on the mas-
     ter  side issues a read() or getmsg() and 0 is returned, the
     user of the master device decides whether to issue a close()
     that dismantles the pseudo-terminal subsystem. If the master
     device is not  closed,  the  pseudo-tty  subsystem  will  be
     available  to  another  user to open the slave device. Since
     0-length messages are used to indicate that the  process  on
     the slave side has closed and should be interpreted that way
     by the process on the master side, applications on the slave
     side should not write 0-length messages. If that occurs, the
     write returns 0, and the 0-length message  is  discarded  by
     the  ptem module.

     The standard STREAMS system calls can access the  pseudo-tty
     devices.    The  slave  devices  support  the  O_NDELAY  and
     O_NONBLOCK flags.

EXAMPLES

     int    fdm fds;
     char   *slavename;
     extern char *ptsname();

     fdm = open("/dev/ptmx", O_RDWR);  /* open master */
     grantpt(fdm);                     /* change permission of   slave */
     unlockpt(fdm);                    /* unlock slave */
     slavename = ptsname(fdm);         /* get name of slave */
     fds = open(slavename, O_RDWR);    /* open slave */
     ioctl(fds, I_PUSH, "ptem");       /* push ptem */
     ioctl(fds, I_PUSH, "ldterm");     /* push ldterm*/

FILES

     /dev/ptmx
           master clone device

     /dev/pts/M
           slave devices (M = 0 -> N-1)

SEE ALSO

     grantpt(3C), ptsname(3C), unlockpt(3C), ldterm(7M), ptm(7D),
     ptem(7M)

     STREAMS Programming Guide