mingetty8

Usage

Overview

mingetty is a minimal getty for use on virtual consoles. Unlike agetty(8), mingetty is not suitable for serial lines. I recommend using mgetty(8) for this purpose.

Options

--noclear

Do not clear the screen before prompting for the login name (the screen is normally cleared).

--nonewline

Do not print a newline before writing out /etc/issue.

--noissue

Do not output /etc/issue.

--nohangup

Do not call vhangup() to disable writing to this tty by other applications.

--nohostname

Do not print the hostname before the login prompt.

--long-hostname

By default the hostname is only printed until the first dot. With this option enabled, the full text from gethostname() is shown.

--loginprog /bin/login

Change the login app.

--nice 10

Change the priority by calling nice().

--delay 5

Sleep this many seconds after startup of mingetty.

--chdir /home

Change into this directory before calling the login prog.

--chroot /chroot

Call chroot() with this directory name.

--autologin username

Log the specified user automatically in without asking for a login name and password. Check the -f option from /bin/login for this.

--loginpause

Wait for any key before dropping to the login prompt. Can be combined with --autologin to save memory by lazily spawning shells.

Issue escapes

mingetty recognizes the following escapes sequences which might be embedded in the /etc/issue file:

\d

insert current day (localtime),

\l

insert line on which mingetty is running,

\m

inserts machine architecture (uname -m),

\n

inserts machine's network node hostname (uname -n),

\o

inserts domain name,

\r

inserts operating system release (uname -r),

\t

insert current time (localtime),

\s

inserts operating system name,

\u

resp. \U the current number of users which are currently logged in. \U inserts "n users", where as \u only inserts "n".

\v

inserts operating system version (uname -v).

Examples

"Linux eos i386 #1 Tue Mar 19 21:54:09 MET 1996" was produced by putting "\s \n \m \v" into /etc/issue.

Files

/etc/issue, /var/run/utmp.