Jor-el & Craig, Thanks for your comments. I did in fact rtfm. Looking in /etc/inittab I can now see that the tty is to do with the consoles tty1 to 6 (and not my serial port ttyS1). The man getty wording (to my untutored mind) concerning baud and modems and dial-in lines made me wonder why I had 4 or more copies of something listening for incoming calls on my modem.
The concern with getty 'listening in' was caused by earlier problems in getting email up and running when at one stage an error message suggested that wvdial(?) could not access the modem and perhaps some other program was using it. Looking at top I spied getty ........ All the best for 2002 which at this time of writing I am happily in while you are still in 2001 (if you are in North America, that is). regards Ian > On Dec 2001, at 14:44, Jor-el wrote: > On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Ian Balchin wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > I see in top that there are always copies of getty running - 4 copies > > that I can see all owned by root. > > > > Is this normal? > > > Ian, > > 'man getty' produces (among other things) : > > DESCRIPTION > getty opens a tty port, prompts for a login name and invokes the > /bin/login command. It is normally > invoked by init(8). > > Does that answer your question? Look at your /etc/inittab and > check to see how many times getty is set to spawn. You should see that > many instances on your system. > > Regards, > Jor-el > > Note : It doesnt hurt to RTFM. Ian Balchin ------------------------------------------------------------------ Fables Bookshop, 119 High Street, Grahamstown, 6139, South Africa email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone or Fax +27-(0)46-636-1525 cell: 083-495-7353 sms [EMAIL PROTECTED] Founder Member Southern African Book Dealers Association http://www.imaginet.co.za/fables The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. -- Rene Descartes.
