pty4freebsd

Usage

Overview

The pty driver provides support for the traditional BSD naming scheme that was used for accessing pseudo-terminals before it was replaced by pts(4). This traditional naming is still used in Linux. When the device /dev/ptyXX is being opened, a new terminal shall be created with the pts(4) driver. A device node for this terminal shall be created, which has the name /dev/ttyXX.

The pty driver also provides a cloning System V /dev/ptmx device.

New code should not try to allocate pseudo-terminals using this interface. It is only provided for compatibility with older C libraries that tried to open such devices when posix_openpt(2) was being called, and for running Linux binaries.

Files

The BSD-style compatibility pseudo-terminal driver uses the following device names:

/dev/pty[l-sL-S][0-9a-v]

Pseudo-terminal master devices.

/dev/tty[l-sL-S][0-9a-v]

Pseudo-terminal slave devices.

/dev/ptmx

Control device, returns a file descriptor to a new master pseudo-terminal when opened.

Diagnostics

None.