posix man page for pty

PTY(4)							   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						    PTY(4)

NAME
     pty -- BSD-style compatibility pseudo-terminal driver

SYNOPSIS
     device pty

DESCRIPTION
     The pty driver provides support for the traditional BSD naming scheme that was used for accessing pseudo-terminals.  When the device
     /dev/ptyXX is being opened, a new terminal shall be created with the pts(4) driver.  A device node for this terminal shall be created, which
     has the name /dev/ttyXX.

     New code should not try to allocate pseudo-terminals using this interface.  It is only provided for compatibility with older C libraries that
     tried to open such devices when posix_openpt(2) was being called.

FILES
     The BSD-style compatibility pseudo-terminal driver uses the following device names:

     /dev/pty[l-sL-S][0-9a-v]  Pseudo-terminal master devices.

     /dev/tty[l-sL-S][0-9a-v]  Pseudo-terminal slave devices.

DIAGNOSTICS
     None.

SEE ALSO
     posix_openpt(2), pts(4), tty(4)

HISTORY
     A pseudo-terminal driver appeared in 4.2BSD.

BUGS
     Unlike previous implementations, the master slave device nodes are destroyed when the PTY becomes unused.	A call to stat(2) on a nonexistent
     master device will already cause a new master device node to be created.  The master device can only be destroyed by opening and closing it.

     The pty driver cannot be unloaded, because it cannot determine if it is being used.

BSD
								  August 20, 2008							       BSD