ABSTRACT
Terminals have been common devices in the communication between users and UNIX systems for a very long time. The modus vivendi for each UNIX system is to provide services to users, so from the very early days of its development, UNIX has paid full attention to terminals as vehicles for users to log into the system. Evidence of this attention can be seen in many UNIX administration issues, primarily by the fact that the system guarantees an immediate respawning of the eventually killed getty process which controls each connected terminal. A terminal connection is too valuable for UNIX to allow it to be lost; a connected terminal without an attached getty process cannot function properly, so the getty process can never die. We will discuss this topic and other terminal-related issues in this Chapter.
