problem with "more" under cygwin-1.3.13-1

Randall R Schulz rrschulz@cris.com
Tue Oct 15 21:16:00 GMT 2002


John,

How does that scheme of opening initial tty descriptors "save a variable?"

By the way, "init" didn't open the descriptors, "getty" did. Those 
descriptors were then inherited by "login" and thence by the user's shell. 
Apart from reading "/etc/inittab" (I think that's what it was called) and 
occasionally writing diagnostics to the system console, init doesn't open 
many files. It mostly just does process handling.

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 20:28 2002-10-15, John Vincent wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Reading from 2 (standard error) is "a little iffy", but back in days of 
>yore, when Unix was either BSD or version 7, it was quite common. The 
>standard behaviour was to open fd 0 (input) with mode 0 (read), fd 1 
>(output) with mode 1 (write) and fd 2 (error) with mode 2 (read&write). 
>The logic was that this saved a variable in the init process that started 
>the login on the ttys. Memory was expensive back then...
>
>Just a little history lesson for the interested ....
>
>/John VIncent


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