19.8. Summary

We started this chapter with an overview of how to use pseudo terminals and a look at some use cases. We continued by examining the code required to open a pseudo terminal under the four platforms discussed in this text. We then used this code to provide the generic pty_fork function that can be used by many different applications. We used this function as the basis for a small program (pty), which we then used to explore many of the properties of pseudo terminals.

Pseudo terminals are used daily on most UNIX systems to provide network logins. We've examined other uses for pseudo terminals, from the script program to driving interactive programs from a batch script.