PTS(4)

NAME
pts - pseudo-terminal driver

DESCRIPTION
The pts 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 VSTOP is ‘^S’ and VSTART is ‘^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
grantpt(3), posix_openpt(2), ptsname(3), pty(4), tty(4)

HISTORY
A pseudo-terminal driver appeared in 4.2BSD. In FreeBSD 8.0, it was replaced with the pts driver.