UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

When a process aborted , it created a core like

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2 Mar 19 14:34 not a tty


This happens very less often, was not able to determine the exact problem.

My doubt is that is it possible to actually create a core "not a tty" ?

What can be the possible root cause of this ? tty failure ?

Thanks,
Priya

Core??? Do you mean "file"?

When does it happen?

The error message "not a tty" usually comes from the stty command being executed from a script that is not connected to a terminal.

Core == coredumps

Well when ? I really dont knw ..

All this is happening on a machine running with embedded software with linux kernel as os.

The phrase "not a tty" comes from the "tty" command.

I would look for a script which is trying to put some output directly to the user's terminal.
The script might contain something along the lines:
echo "hello" > "`tty`"
This would work in foreground but create a file called "not a tty" if run from cron or a background process.

It may help you trace the fault if you find out what is in the file called "not a tty".
cat "not a tty" | sed -n l