Hi friends,

I am working on Freescale`s MPC8313 Board.
The /etc/inittab file on board, contain the one line given below, "::respawn:/sbin/getty -L console 0 screen"

So,what is the meaning of console & 0 in this line.
screen is the value of my TERM environment variable.

So, Please tell me, what is the use of console & 0 here.

Thanks in Advance

console is the name of the device or port in the /dev directory, that is, the getty process will control the serial port which is connected to /dev/console. The 0 is in the position where I would usually expect to see the baud rate (or a list of baud rates which are tried in order), eg 9600 or 19200,9600,4800,1200. The effect of having a zero in this position may depend on the flavour of Linux/Unix you are running, maybe it means "try and auto-detect the baud rate" or maybe it's just a place-holder where you are expected to fill in the value yourself?

It's a long time since I used a serial terminal on Unix, but "man getty" is a useful guide.

Thank you for your great response.

I am working on Linux Kernel-2.6.20(vanila), patched with Freescale board support packages.

I just want to ask one more think,
Why the id (first) field in this line is empty. ?

If you are using tty1 this filed having value 1.
In this case we are using console.
So is there any relation of console and this filed.
Why id field is empty?

Thanks In Advance,

Usually the first field is a 1 to 4 character unique identifier of the inittab line. Some systems limit it to 2 characters. I'm not sure what it does, if anything, it might just be to help you extract selected lines from your inittab using grep or something. In the case of tty lines, I remember we used to set it to the tty line number (eg 01 for /dev/tty01), again I don't know the effect of not doing this.

In the case of the console, I would probably try setting it to 00, and if that didn't work, maybe 01 or 1.

Lots of things to do with getty and inittab often seem to be historical relics, and different Unix systems could interpret fields differently. My Ubuntu system doesn't even have an inittab, so if you are having problems, maybe inittab is not the place to be looking. init on my system starts off by looking at scripts in /etc/event.d, and in that directory there are text files called tty1...tty7 which make some reference to respawning gettys.