Date: Wed, 5 Jul 1995 17:29:21 +0800 (WST) From: Peter Wemm <peter@haywire.DIALix.COM> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: tty names longer than two meaningful characters.. Message-ID: <Pine.SV4.3.91.950705165326.22641P-100000@haywire.DIALix.COM>
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Hi all.. Does anybody have any strong opinions on the number of significant letters in tty names? Things like ps, w, etc tend to truncate them to two letters after the "tty" part. I've been thinking about going through and finding and extending the limits. Does anybody have any particular preference on how this is done? My initial thoughts were to expand the two letters to either three or four. If there are 4, then "tty1234" is a total of 7 characters, plus the NULL, to fit into the 8 characters in utmp.ut_line[8]. The commercial drivers for things like Specialix, Digiboard, etc tend to use a letter prefix and up to three digits. For example, a SCO/SVR4/Unixware (sorry for the obscene words on a BSD list.. :-) system with Specialix XIO host cards and panels can have up to 128 ports in a system. Specialix use ttya00 -> ttya99 -> ttya127 (for non-modem control ports) and ttyA00 -> ttyA127 for modem control ports. Anyway, the specifics of what the characters are used for is not that important right now.. That can be defined later with whatever front-end drivers or numbering systems are designed. What I guess is important, is: 1) Do people want larger tty columns? 2) How much larger? 1 or 2 extra characters? 3) as a corollary to #2, how many characters are people prepared to give up on 80 column displays? ps -u (for example) is pretty tight.. 4) would having the tty column dynamically expand/contract depending on the size of the largest tty be worth the effort? How many things would break that are trying to parse the output of these dynamic commands? Now is the time to have your say.. (and if anybody saved the list of tools that truncate to two letters that Terry posted a few months ago, *please* send me a copy! :-) (Unless of course Terry is listening in instead of devoting his full efforts on his vacation)) Cheers, -Peter
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