TTY(4)			   Linux Programmers Manual		       TTY(4)



NAME
       tty - controlling terminal

DESCRIPTION
       The  file  /dev/tty  is	a character file with major number 5 and minor
       number 0, usually of mode 0666 and owner.group root.tty.  It is a  syn
       onym for the controlling terminal of a process, if any.

       In  addition  to the ioctl(2) requests supported by the device that tty
       refers to, the ioctl(2) request TIOCNOTTY is supported.

   TIOCNOTTY
       Detach the calling process from its controlling terminal.

       If the process is the session leader, then SIGHUP and  SIGCONT  signals
       are  sent to the foreground process group and all processes in the cur
       rent session lose their controlling tty.

       This  ioctl(2)  call  only  works  on  file  descriptors  connected  to
       /dev/tty.   It  is  used by daemon processes when they are invoked by a
       user at a terminal.  The process attempts to  open  /dev/tty.   If  the
       open succeeds, it detaches itself from the terminal by using TIOCNOTTY,
       while if the open fails, it is obviously not attached to a terminal and
       does not need to detach itself.

FILES
       /dev/tty

SEE ALSO
       chown(1),  mknod(1),  ioctl(2),	termios(3),  console(4), tty_ioctl(4),
       ttyS(4), agetty(8), mingetty(8)

COLOPHON
       This page is part of release 3.05 of the Linux  man-pages  project.   A
       description  of	the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.



Linux				  2003-04-07				TTY(4)