a tty????
 

hello,

Sorry for this very simple question i have to ask... what is tty?
can anyone give me a link which would explain details regarding tty's?

tty means serial port i'm pretty sure, this usual has something to do with the modem connection....why do you ask?

try searching around in the forums....

Garry :D

It is a little bit wrong, ttyS is a serial port (COM port) , tty is a file name of a terminal connected to standard input (keyboards for instance), so basically this is a terminal, Xterm for instance is a program to emulate *NIX terminal.
apropos tty
man tty

ah ok...
Is is true that one way to secure you linux box is to limit the virtual terminals and tty on the securetty?
And why are the tty's from 1 to 11 only? Does it corresponds to a certain standard input?

I am not sure about maximum numbers of tty's you can run on your system, but it is well beyond 11, as for virtual terminals, yes it is believed a good security practice to limit number of vtty's on your system, usually you can limit them in /etc/inittab, also you can restrict root access on vtty's and tty's through /etc/securetty

for example if i have 5 Virtual Terminals, 5 xterm windows and 5 gnome-terminals in use, then I have tty0 - tty14 in use?

And does tty's pass information to shell(for example bash or tcsh) and shell passes information back to tty's?