One post tagged with "Pseudo Terminal"

Preamble​

When you open a terminal, you are greeted with a prompt and the system expects your input. But have you ever wondered what sort of device the terminal really is? A terminal is more than just a window for typing commands — it is a character special device managed by the kernel, with a layered architecture involving device drivers, line discipline modules, and pseudo-terminal pairs. In this post, we'll explore the internals of the UNIX terminal device: how tty and pty devices work, what terminal line discipline does, and how the kernel mediates between the user and the shell process. This is the first in a three-part series. The second post covers how the shell process executes programs, and the third explores writing portable C code.