More on 7/8 bits at login

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Sat Nov 5 06:09:15 AEST 1988


>	...in which case they may have trouble logging in.
>	("getty" strips the 8th bit itself, but "getpass", used by
>	"login", doesn't.)"
>
>But by the time login is running, you're not in raw mode any longer.
>Or was this "fixed" in system V?

Yes, it was fixed in System V; there's not really any such thing as "raw
mode".

More to the point, there's no notion that "non-raw mode" means "7 bit
characters only" (that notion is even somewhat gone in 4.3BSD, given
PASS8, and will probably be completely gone in a future release). 

By the time "login" is running, the system is (generally) doing
erase/kill processing, XON/XOFF processing, and interrupt character
processing (unless you've set up "/etc/gettytab" really strangely);
however, there is NO guarantee that either the hardware or the software
is stripping characters to 7 bits (unless you set "/etc/gettytab" up to
do that - but the guy *doesn't* want it to do that, so he specifically
wants to set it up *not* to do that). 



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