Re: Userland problems from kern.pts.enable=1

On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 17:39 -0400, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> When the kern.pts.enable sysctl is set to '1', pseudo-ttys are created
> with device name /dev/pts/${NUMBER}.  With some kernel fixes from kib
> this appears to now be stable and the kernel side is ready for a
> possible change of default.  However, the new device naming confuses
> some userland utilities.  For example:
> 
> pointyhat# write simon
> write: /dev/398: No such file or directory
> 
> simon was logged in on /dev/pts/398.
> 
> killall -t also fails to parse the new device format:
> 
> bento# ps -t pts/187
>   PID  TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
> 67734 187  Ss     0:00.04 /bin/csh
> 72599 187  R+     0:00.00 ps -t pts/187
> bento# killall -t pts/187
> killall: stat(/dev/ttypts/187): No such file or directory
> 
> It would also be useful if ps -t recognized a numeric argument as
> magic and converted it to add the pts/.  It already appears to do the
> converse when displaying the TTY, as you can see above.
> 
> There are probably other utilities also affected.
> 
> Kris
> 

If no-one has already started working on these, I've had a look at a few
of these utils and the changes look quite straightforward. I've been
looking for something like this (simple enough for me to do, simple
enough that a I can't £$%^ it up too much) so I can contribute back to
FreeBSD. 

So far, I'm looking at usr.bin/killall, bin/ps and usr.bin/write

Tom