MINGETTY

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (8)
Updated: 6 Apr 1996
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NAME

mingetty - minimal getty for consoles

SYNOPSIS

mingetty [--noclear] [--nonewline] [--noissue] [--nohangup] [--nohostname] [--long-hostname] [--loginprog=/bin/login] [--nice=10] [--delay=5] [--chdir=/home] [--chroot=/chroot] [--autologin username] [--loginpause] tty

DESCRIPTION

mingetty is a minimal getty for use on virtual consoles. Unlike agetty(8), mingetty is not suitable for serial lines. I recommend using mgetty(8) for this purpose.

OPTIONS

--noclear: Do not clear the screen before prompting for the login name (the screen is normally cleared).
--nonewline: Do not print a newline before writing out /etc/issue.
--noissue: Do not output /etc/issue.
--nohangup: Do not call vhangup() to disable writing to this tty by other applications.
--nohostname: Do not print the hostname before the login prompt.
--long-hostname: By default the hostname is only printed until the first dot. With this option enabled, the full text from gethostname() is shown.
--loginprog /bin/login: Change the login app.
--nice 10: Change the priority by calling nice().
--delay 5: Sleep this many seconds after startup of mingetty.
--chdir /home: Change into this directory before calling the login prog.
--chroot /chroot: Call chroot() with this directory name.
--autologin username: Log the specified user automatically in without asking for a login name and password. Check the -f option from /bin/login for this.
--loginpause: Wait for any key before dropping to the login prompt. Can be combined with --autologin to save memory by lazily spawning shells.

ISSUE ESCAPES

mingetty recognizes the following escapes sequences which might be embedded in the /etc/issue file:

\d: insert current day (localtime),
\l: insert line on which mingetty is running,
\m: inserts machine architecture (uname -m),
\n: inserts machine's network node hostname (uname -n),
\o: inserts domain name,
\r: inserts operating system release (uname -r),
\t: insert current time (localtime),
\s: inserts operating system name,
\u: resp. \U the current number of users which are currently logged in. \U inserts "n users", where as \u only inserts "n".
\v: inserts operating system version (uname -v).

EXAMPLE

"Linux eos i386 #1 Tue Mar 19 21:54:09 MET 1996" was produced by putting "\s \n \m \v" into /etc/issue.

FILES

/etc/issue, /var/run/utmp.