Why so many tty's/pty's ?

[saltire]

Just wondering...

Why is my /dev directory stuffed full of tty (teletype) and pty (pseudo-teletype) devices? Surely they aren't all needed. Is it a historical thing? Can I remove some of them for the sake of keeping things simple?

Any thoughts appreciated.

saltire

[askrieger]

Re: Why so many tty's/pty's ?

I think it's a throw back to the days of timesharing systems when many people logged in to one cpu through serial terminals. I've never seen a unix or linux system that didn't have them. I did a google/linux on /dev/tty and I found a couple of interesting links, but no answer. Check out:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2597
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Text-Terminal-HOWTO-6.html
and http://library.linux360.ro/books/lin...m-hierarchy/p0

[saltire]

Re: Why so many tty's/pty's ?

Great stuff, Askrieger:

These articles certainly shed some light on the situation. Now I can go through and decide if I want to remove any of the 200-odd terminals in /dev, and if so, which ones.

Thanks!

[claydoh]

Re: Why so many tty's/pty's ?

just note that you may make your /dev/ simpler, but you won't be saving any real HD space as those character and block devices are all 0 bytes, and it probably won't speed up your system unless it is incredibly old