Q:
On a Linux system, what is the difference between /dev/console , /dev/tty and /dev/tty0 ?
What is their respective use? How do they compare?
A:From the documentation:
/dev/tty Current TTY device
/dev/console System console
/dev/tty0 Current virtual console
In the good old days /dev/console
was System Administrator console. And TTYs were users' serial devices attached to a server. Now /dev/console
and /dev/tty0
represent current display and usually are the same. You can override it for example by adding console=ttyS0
to grub.conf
. After that your /dev/tty0
is a monitor and /dev/console
is /dev/ttyS0
.
An exercise to show the difference between /dev/tty
and /dev/tty0
:
Switch to the 2nd console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2. Login as root
. Type sleep 5; echo tty0 > /dev/tty0
. Press Enter and switch to the 3rd console by pressing Alt+F3. Now switch back to the 2nd console by pressing Alt+F2. Type sleep 5; echo tty > /dev/tty
, press Enter and switch to the 3rd console.
You can see that tty
is the console where process starts, and tty0
is a always current console.
A:
-
/dev/console
is a virtual set of devices which can be set as a parameter at boot time. It might be redirected to a serial device or a virtual console and by default points to/dev/tty0
. When multipleconsole=
options are passed to the kernel, the console output will go to more than one device. -
/dev/tty0
is the current virtual console -
/dev/tty[1-x]
is one of the virtual consoles you switch to with control-alt-F1 and so on. -
/dev/tty
is the console used by the process querying it. Unlike the other devices, you do not need root privileges to write to it. Note also that processes like the ones launched bycron
and similar batch processes have no usable/dev/tty
, as they aren't associated with any. These processes have a?
in theTTY
column ofps -ef
output.