STATSERIAL(1)

💅 STATSERIAL(1) — the statserial glow-up

okay so bestie, this is the statserial page from the Linux User Commands manual, and it's honestly iconic for debugging serial-port drama. Let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

statserial — display serial port modem status lines

like, it shows you what the modem lines are doing. that's the whole vibe. 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

statserial [-n |  -d | -x] <device-name>

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

statserial displays a table of the signals on a standard 9-pin or 25-pin serial port, and it tells you the status of the handshaking lines. highkey useful for debugging problems with serial ports or modems — it's giving "diagnostic main character energy" ngl ✨

The optional device-name parameter is the full name of the device file for the serial port in question. If you don't specify it, the default comes from the environment variable MODEM if set, otherwise it falls back to /dev/cua1. slay, sensible defaults 💖

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👑 COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS 👑

heads up bestie: each of the command line options is mutually exclusive. pick one, okay? one. not all three. 🙈

• -n — Normally statserial will loop continuously, updating the status at one second intervals; you can exit using Ctrl+C. The -n option disables looping. so it prints once and dips 💅
• -d — With this option the status of the modem is printed as a decimal number. The bits are encoded as follows (XXX indicates unused bits):

+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|DSR|RI |DCD|CTS|XXX|XXX|RTS|DTR|XXX|
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

• -x — This option is the same as -d, except that the output is in hexadecimal. hex girl summer 🔥

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💀 BUGS/LIMITATIONS 💀

bestie read this part fr fr, it's the plot twist 😭

• statserial only works with devices that support the TIOCMGET ioctl.
• You need permission to read the device file.
• The device file may be locked if other applications are using it.

no cap, if it's not working, check these three things first. 🙏

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🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

statserial was written by Jeff Tranter (Jeff_Tranter@Mitel.COM), later updated by Frank Baumgart (godot@uni-paderborn.de) and is released under the conditions of the GNU General Public License. See the file COPYING and notes in the source code for details. legends only 👑💜

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• setserial(8)
• stty(1)
• /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/serial.c
• /usr/include/linux/termios.h

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and that's the whole page, bestie! 🍓 this one's a Linux manual page, dated 17 December 1994 — vintage but still eating, iykyk 💖✨🎀