Virtual serial port?

Hi,
I have a little .c program which read data from a serial a port.
If I use a PC where is a serial port with the machine connected to the port than I can read the data.
The problem is that on my laptop, I don't have serial port. Can I simulate a serial port where I send some data and my .c program will read from there like he read from a real serial port.
I need this option because I want to test my .c program on my laptop because I can't access the PC with the serial port and with the machine which is connected to the port.

Thanks for reply

No actual experience using it.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-linux-797851/
http://tty0tty.sourceforge.net/

What you're looking for are pseudo terminals. See man pty

The BSD style ones are no longer supported; life was very easy with them. If you have an old distro (RH7 or so) they are still there. I personally find the unix98 style ones far more complicated.

Use tty0tty as indicated above; if you use the code from the linuxquestions link, it will throw a warning, so you might be better of with the sourceforge link (not checked).

wim@i3-2120:~/tty0tty$ gcc -Wall -O2 -D_GNU_SOURCE tty0tty.c -o tty0tty
tty0tty.c: In function ‘main’:
tty0tty.c:66:32: warning: ignoring return value of ‘write’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result [-Wunused-result]
tty0tty.c:68:32: warning: ignoring return value of ‘write’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result [-Wunused-result]
wim@i3-2120:~/tty0tty$ ls -l
total 16
-rwxrwxr-x 1 wim wim 8896 Oct  5 15:34 tty0tty
-rw-rw-r-- 1 wim wim 1075 Oct  5 15:34 tty0tty.c

Once you have an executable tty0tty, you can start it

wim@i3-2120:~/tty0tty$ ./tty0tty 
(/dev/pts/2) <=> (/dev/pts/3)

Keep it running!

Use a terminal program (e.g minicom) to use one of the two (e.g /dev/pts/2). Use your application to use the other one (e.g. /dev/pts/3).

wim@i3-2120:~$ minicom -p /dev/pts/2

Note:
you might need to configure minicom so it does not send ATZ commands

Be careful on laptops and many desktops. Some have legacy parts or code that makes some apps think there really is a com1 and com2 installed.\

I think you need to test this in a virtual machine maybe or a real system that is configured like you need. Also test it with higher com port numbers such as one might find in a usb to serial adapter.