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Of course it can be. You just have to make sure that stdin and stdout point to the right things. In fact, the network superserver, inetd, presents network communications to the service apps as stdin and stdout. The gettys you're trying to use will present the appropriate things as serial ports.


Agreed.

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There is no way to automatically log in. You can circumvent the things that allow you to log in in the first place to grab the console and run your program there, but that will prevent you from being able to drop back to a shell unless you add something else that makes that shell happen. And you can do the same thing on your other serial port without disabling normal access to your console.

I do not want to give up access to the shell and I do not want to have to use one serial port to interract with the shell and another to interract with my application. Further, my application already works and is "complete." So, it is "harder" to switch to another port (even if only trivial effort) than to stay with what I have.
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Do you want to avoid having the ability to run the program and have a console at the same time?

Not particularly avoid, but I have no need to run the application and have the shell at the same time. My app dumps some status info to the console while running. So the shell needs to be on another port or unavailable to the console while the app is running. Again I refer to the example of the empeg. It is exactly what I want.
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Do you think that getting it to run on that other serial port is going to be more difficult than getting it working on the console?

No, I just don't want to have to keep swapping my serial cable back and forth.
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Do you think you'd have more console access if it was not on a different serial port?

no. see above.
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Do you think that you wouldn't be able to access a shell if it was on a different serial port?

no. see above.
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Do you need to see console spam while running the application?

Console spam? What's that?
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I don't hate you and I'm not flaming you. I'm trying to prevent you from doing something that I think is going to require more work and be more difficult to maintain while also lessening your access to the computer than doing it the "correct" way to begin with.

I don't claim that you hate or flame, I state that the linux forums are full of hate and flame and that it is difficult to ask some questions there.

Again, I don't want to do anything strange that is going to require more work. It seems to me that if my system could behave like my empeg it would be great. It seems that this is difficult, so I am exploring other options.

If I understand you correctly, you assert that the correct way to do this is to make my application into a daemon that starts from an /etc/rc#.d script and uses the other serial port for interraction while leaving the "primary" serial port for normal console logins. Is this correct?

--steve