termio(7)

💖 termio — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so real quick, this is termio from the Linux man-pages set — Miscellaneous Information Manual, section 7. Sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let me tell you about the terminal driver interface that's giving vintage in the most literal way.

---

✨ NAME ✨

termio — the System V terminal driver interface 🫶

---

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So. termio? That's the name of the old System V terminal driver interface. Old old. Like, it was doing its thing before your fave was even compiled. 💅

This interface defined a termio structure — that's the lil data holder where all your terminal settings lived — and honestly it also brought a whole range of ioctl(2) operations along with it, so you could get and set terminal attributes. Very "get and set", very boss.

🚨 but bestie, listen. The termio interface is now obsolete. Like, deprecated-before-it-was-cool obsolete.

Here's the tea, no cap: POSIX.1-1990 came through and standardized a modified version of this interface, and they named it termios. Iconic rebrand fr fr. ✨

And the glow-up wasn't just a name change:

• The POSIX.1 data structure differs slightly from the System V version. Not a full transformation, just a lil tweak here and there. 🦋
• POSIX.1 also defined a whole suite of functions to replace the various ioctl(2) operations that existed back in System V. That's the main character move right there. 👑

And why did they do all that? Okay so this part is important:

ioctl(2) was unstandardized, and its variadic third argument does not allow argument type checking. So like… yeah. That's the reason. The compiler can't vibe check your args when the signature is playing it that loose. 😭

---

🎀 so you're looking for a page called "termio"? 🎀

Not me about to redirect you 💀 — if you came here hunting for a page literally named termio, you can probably find most of the info you're looking for in either termios(7) or ioctl_tty(2). That's where the good stuff lives now, bestie. Go go go. 🧚

---

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

The whole squad, in the order the manpage says it:

• reset(1)
• setterm(1)
• stty(1)
• ioctl_tty(2)
• termios(7)
• tty(4)

---

and that's the whole page, periodt 💖

this was termio(7) from Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-07-02 — mwah, thanks for reading, you ate that 🫶✨💅