pty bugs & features

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <3954 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
> >I would think this could be a problem with other drivers besides ptys.
> It could be.  Unfortunately, just about *any* close behavior is going to
> screw *somebody*.

Not necessarily.

> Waiting forever for output to drain can lock up a tty port forever if it
> gets ^S'ed and there's output waiting.

This is the correct behavior. The difficulties with locking up tty ports
are reflections of two different problems: first, that ptys aren't
dynamically allocated in 4BSD; and second, that standard ttys exist at
all. Hardwired /dev/tty* should be replaced with raw /dev/modem* and so
on; *all* tty use should go through a common interface provided by a
pseudo-terminal session manager. This would solve many problems at once.

---Dan