[net.unix-wizards] More getty questions

bobvan (09/13/82)

Is there any good reason why getty (4.1BSD) doesn't set CRMOD until
just before it forks login?  Life would be a lot easier for daemons
that want to write to the console if CRMOD was set in both the
"iflags" and "fflags".  If this has some real value, perhaps only
the console (type "4") could be changed.

Can anyone explain this?

				Bob Van Valzah
				(...!decvax!ittvax!tpdcvax!bobvan)

dan@Bbn-Unix@sri-unix (09/22/82)

From: Dan Franklin <dan@Bbn-Unix>
Date: 17 Sep 1982 11:33:27 EDT (Friday)
I believe it's mostly historical.  Some terminals (or at any rate,
one terminal, the TTY 37) use a newline key instead of
a CR key, and interpret an LF as a newline sequence.  Getty identifies
those terminals by looking at the character terminating the username
line to see whether it's a CR or an LF.  It can't do that if CRMOD
is set, because unfortunately (as with most of the UNIX tty modes)
it affects both input and output, and there's no way to map LF to CRLF
on output without also mapping CR to LF on input.

If you have no TTY 37s you can probably get by without this feature.