SHOWCONSOLE(8)

📦 version 2.45, in opensuse-leap 16.0

💅 SHOWCONSOLE(8) — the SUSE boot concept, bestie edition ✨

Okay so this is showconsole(8), straight out of the SUSE boot concept, and honestly? It's lowkey a lifesaver. Let's get into it. 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

  • Showconsole — literally just figures out the real tty of stdin, no cap.
  • Setconsole — redirects system console output to a tty. Iconic behaviour.

⭐ SYNOPSIS ⭐

showconsole [-n]

setconsole [-r|/dev/tty<xy>]

That's it. That's the whole vibe check. 🦋

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So showconsole does the thing where it determines the real character device of the current system console. Why do you care? Because you can run it on /dev/console as the current character device and get the actual real character device back. It's giving detective energy. 🔍✨

Then there's setconsole — give it a terminal device as an argument and it redirects the output that would have gone to /dev/console or /dev/tty0 over to the terminal you picked. Slay.

And if you pass no argument at all, or use the option? setconsole undoes any redirection. Back to default, no drama. 💅

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • -n — returns the major and minor device numbers instead of the device file name. Super useful because you can ask the kernel for the major and minor device numbers of a device file that doesn't even exist in /dev yet. Not me using this to peek at devices that aren't born yet 😭👑

💀 BUGS 💀

Real talk, there are some things you gotta know:

showconsole needs a mounted /proc file system, okay? Non-negotiable.

It also tries to set the controlling tty to stdin if no controlling tty is found. And after reading /proc, it restores the status of the controlling tty — specifically to avoid problems with getty processes. Considerate queen behaviour honestly. 👑

🎀 FILES 🎀

  • /proc/<pid of showconsole>/stat — the stat file of the showconsole process. Like its little birth certificate.
  • /dev/console — the system console. The main character, fr fr. 🌈

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

blogd(8), console(4), tty(4), proc(5). Go read those next, bestie, iykyk. 📚

2000 Werner Fink, 2000 SuSE GmbH Nuernberg, Germany.

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Werner Fink <werner@suse.de> — thank you for your service, king 🫡💖

Okay that's the whole page! And before I go — this lil masterpiece comes to you from the 3rd Berkeley Distribution, dated Jan 14, 2016, and it's the SHOWCONSOLE(8) page. Obsessed with her, honestly. Periodt. 🎀✨🌸

📦 where this page comes from