MINGETTY(8)

💖 MINGETTY(8) — ok so listen, bestie

It's mingetty, it's section 8 of the Linux Programmer's Manual, and it's about to be your new fave little console greeter. No cap. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

mingetty — the minimal getty for consoles. That's it, that's the whole vibe. 💅

🌸 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 🦋

So mingetty is a minimal getty, and it lives on your virtual consoles, periodt. It is NOT like agetty(8) though — bestie, do not try to put this on a serial line, it is literally not built for that. If serial lines are your thing, the man page itself says "I recommend using mgetty(8) for this purpose." Iconic, honestly. Go use mgetty(8). 🫶

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --noclear — don't clear the screen before it asks you for the login name. (Normally the screen does get cleared, so this is your "leave my scrollback alone" button.) ✨
• --nonewline — don't print a newline before writing out /etc/issue.
• --noissue — just... don't output /etc/issue at all. Skip it, it's giving nothing today. 🙈
• --nohangup — don't call vhangup() to disable writing to this tty by other applications.
• --nohostname — don't print the hostname before the login prompt.
• --long-hostname — by default the hostname is only printed until the first dot. With this one enabled, you get the full text from gethostname(). Main character hostname energy. 👑
• --loginprog /bin/login — change the login app. (Yes, /bin/login is the default, look at it up there in the synopsis.)
• --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 — logs the specified user in automatically, no login name, no password, no asking. Check the -f option from /bin/login for this.
• --loginpause — wait for any key before dropping to the login prompt. You can combine it with --autologin to save memory by lazily spawning shells. Lazy but make it efficient. 😌

🌈 ISSUE ESCAPES 🌈

mingetty recognizes these escape sequences, and you can embed them in your /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". (Yes, \U is the chatty one. 💬)
• \v — inserts operating system version (uname -v).

🍓 EXAMPLE 🍓

This string right here:

Linux eos i386 #1 Tue Mar 19 21:54:09 MET 1996

was produced by putting "\s \n \m \v" into /etc/issue. Ate, no crumbs. 🔥

💜 FILES 💜

• /etc/issue
• /var/run/utmp

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• mgetty(8)
• agetty(8)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright © 1996 Florian La Roche <laroche@redhat.com>. Man-page written by David Frey <David.Frey@eos.lugs.ch> and Florian La Roche.

And that's the whole page, bestie! 💖 This little cutie came to you as Debian-Local, dated 6 Apr 1996, and honestly? It's been serving console login prompts ever since. Slay. 💅✨