playing tricks with my OS's mind

[Richard Goerwitz]

Xenix has been around a while, and is currently serving me well.
One annoying feature that persists in Xenix is its incomplete
implementation of telinit, and its odd way of handling inittab.
Basically, telinit converts inittab entries to native Xenix ttys
entries.  Inittab under Xenix can't do anything fancy like speci-
fy different getty commands for different ports.

In efforts to work around this problem, I tried writing a small
C program, & inserting it in place of my old getty command.  The prog. accepts
the arguments handed to it by init, but then looks at a new file
(myinittab) for fuller tty information.  Depending on which com-
mand is specified in myinittab, I have it overlay itself with vari-
ous programs (e.g. the widely distributed agetty).  In sum, I am trying
to cheat Xenix into acting in this respect like one might expect
a SysV implementation to act.

I simply don't know enough to really make this workaround work.  For
instance, although everything seems to work fine, I have an annoying
problem with the way input is handled.  Normally when one enters a
password the characters are not echoed.  With the setup I created,
they _are_ echoed.  Other slightly strange behaviors may be noticed.
Clearly I am missing some simple point.  If some site around here
had the init source, I might perhaps be able to answer this question.
Lacking this I turn to the net.

As is often said here, if this is a stupid question, I'm sorry.  I
really doubt, though, that followups to the net would be unwelcome.
Clearly I'm not the only one on this planet with a thing or two to
learn about Unix process control.


   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%sophist at uchicago.bitnet
   goer at sophist.uchicago.edu         rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer