What does the abbrev. form ptty mean?

From what I found on google it is a remote login like from ssh or something. No gaurantees on that though. tty's are local like when you are sitting at the system itself and using the monitor/keyboard directly connected to the system.

Hope that helps a bit anyway.

Later

My guess: pseudo-tty

(where tty is "teletype")

No one uses real terminals anymore these days. We all use virtual (i.e. "pseudo") terminals -- like xterms.

In olden tymes, after getting a shave at the barber and having your horse re-shoed, you might log in at the mainframe -- right there in the auditorium where it was kept. If you did that, you'd be logging into the console itself. If instead you went to another nearby room containing a keyboard and a display screen (both hooked together and connected by a long wire to the mainframe), you might log in that way -- i.e. from a terminal (which hardware-wise consisted of a teletpye, or "tty").

BTW, I'm really actually not old enough to have been around for that, but I've read accounts written by our fore-fathers who've used such arcane devices. :)

I'm only old enough to remember stuff as far back as the TRS-80. :)

It's a pseudo-terminal, and it's pretty much what Dalek said, a ssh terminal when you logged into a remote host.

It doesn't have to be ssh, it can also be telnet,rlogin or other network connections.