ttyslot (3)
Leading comments
Copyright (C) 2002 Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl> %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Since the L...
NAME
ttyslot - find the slot of the current user's terminal in some fileSYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h> /* on BSD-like systems, and Linux */#include <stdlib.h> /* on System V-like systems */
int ttyslot(void);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
ttyslot():
-
_BSD_SOURCE ||
_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE_ < 500 && _XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED
DESCRIPTION
The legacy function ttyslot() returns the index of the current user's entry in some file.Now "What file?" you ask. Well, let's first look at some history.
Ancient history
There used to be a file /etc/ttys in UNIX V6, that was read by the init(1) program to find out what to do with each terminal line. Each line consisted of three characters. The first character was either aq0aq or aq1aq, where aq0aq meant "ignore". The second character denoted the terminal: aq8aq stood for "/dev/tty8". The third character was an argument to getty(8) indicating the sequence of line speeds to try (aq-aq was: start trying 110 baud). Thus a typical line was "18-". A hang on some line was solved by changing the aq1aq to a aq0aq, signaling init, changing back again, and signaling init again.In UNIX V7 the format was changed: here the second character was the argument to getty(8) indicating the sequence of line speeds to try (aq0aq was: cycle through 300-1200-150-110 baud; aq4aq was for the on-line console DECwriter) while the rest of the line contained the name of the tty. Thus a typical line was "14console".
Later systems have more elaborate syntax. System V-like systems have /etc/inittab instead.
Ancient history (2)
On the other hand, there is the file /etc/utmp listing the people currently logged in. It is maintained by login(1). It has a fixed size, and the appropriate index in the file was determined by login(1) using the ttyslot() call to find the number of the line in /etc/ttys (counting from 1).The semantics of ttyslot
Thus, the function ttyslot() returns the index of the controlling terminal of the calling process in the file /etc/ttys, and that is (usually) the same as the index of the entry for the current user in the file /etc/utmp. BSD still has the /etc/ttys file, but System V-like systems do not, and hence cannot refer to it. Thus, on such systems the documentation says that ttyslot() returns the current user's index in the user accounting data base.RETURN VALUE
If successful, this function returns the slot number. On error (e.g., if none of the file descriptors 0, 1 or 2 is associated with a terminal that occurs in this data base) it returns 0 on UNIX V6 and V7 and BSD-like systems, but -1 on System V-like systems.ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).| Interface | Attribute | Value |
| ttyslot() | Thread safety | MT-Unsafe |
CONFORMING TO
SUSv1; marked as LEGACY in SUSv2; removed in POSIX.1-2001. SUSv2 requires -1 on error.NOTES
The utmp file is found various places on various systems, such as /etc/utmp, /var/adm/utmp, /var/run/utmp.The glibc2 implementation of this function reads the file _PATH_TTYS, defined in <ttyent.h> as "/etc/ttys". It returns 0 on error. Since Linux systems do not usually have "/etc/ttys", it will always return 0.
Minix also has fttyslot(fd).