> I still do not understand why you thinks this is the correct behavior.
> I've never seend any operating system blocking the serial devices if
> there's no carrier. Excuse me but I consider this as somehow brain dead.

Every version of Unix I've ever seen (from 4.2BSD to 286 Xenix) has modem
ports block if the CD is not active. This makes perfect sense; you generally
don't want to do I/O to the modem when it's not hooked up to anything
except for special cases like dialing. It certainly makes writing a program
like getty much easier.

Some systems also offer an alternate device (by changing the minor device
number) that lets you do I/O without CD being present. NetBSD does this
by letting you set the clocal flag on the interface. I've hacked manual
dialing scripts from the shell with no problem doing this; I suggest you
try something like:

	chat <whatever> </dev/tty00 >/dev/tty00 &
	stty -f /dev/tty00 57600 -echo cs8 clocal etc.
	wait

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		We were there long enough to see
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