Very Computer

I am considering writing a program that will watch the tty that it is run from
for a talk request and if one is found will send a response to the person.

My problem at this point is I don't know how to read from the tty for the talk
request?  Is there an easy way to do this?  

I have tried just opening the tty as a file and reading from it but that only
gets stuff typed at the keyboard.  Things like the talk request seem to go
directly to the screen.  

I would rewrite the talk daemon but then I would have to convince the sysadmin
of the system I use to use my talk daemon.  So I would rather end up with a
program that could be run on any unix system.

Also, is there already a program out there that will do this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

--
Scott Sorrell

Sorry, scott, but the talk daemon does not check for data on the tty: the
talk requests are 'posted' to a TCP/IP port and handled by the talkd
program afterward. As the talkd program has suid 'root', it may wrtie to
anyone's tty.
If you want to know more about this, check the linux networking sources
on sunsite.unc.edu.

This is not what I was asking about.  I know how the talkd works.

What I want to know is if there is any way to read the info that the talkd
writes to the user's tty.

--
Scott Sorrell

|> I am considering writing a program that will watch the tty that it is run from
|> for a talk request and if one is found will send a response to the person.
|>
|> My problem at this point is I don't know how to read from the tty for the talk
|> request?  Is there an easy way to do this?  
|>
|> I have tried just opening the tty as a file and reading from it but that only
|> gets stuff typed at the keyboard.  Things like the talk request seem to go
|> directly to the screen.  
|>
|> I would rewrite the talk daemon but then I would have to convince the sysadmin
|> of the system I use to use my talk daemon.  So I would rather end up with a
|> program that could be run on any unix system.
|>
|> Also, is there already a program out there that will do this?
|>
|> Thanks in advance for any help.
|>
|> --
|> Scott Sorrell

when the talkd writes to a tty its output occures on the output queue
of the terminal. when you do a read you will get characters from the
input queue. you cannot get characters from the output queue.

what you need is a pseudo terminal driver with its slave terminal
registered in /etc/utmp.
on the pseudo terminal master device then you can read the data written to
the slave device and can do with it what ever you want.

kf

--

 Just wondering, is that how ttysnoop works? or is there some other way
than this?

Russell
--

 Student of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering
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