>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.

Actually, it's not that uncommon at all.  SunOS does this, for one.

However, a large number of OS's provide "dialout" devices which will _not_
block when there is no carrier.  The good points and bad points of dialout
devices have been debated before, so it's not worth it to rehash that
again.

While we're on the subject of this, however ... is pppd ever going to get
fixed?  I did send-pr a fix that would open the tty device only when the
"modem" flag was set, which seemed like to me a good solution.  I wouldn't
normally complain, but this has been broken forever and nothing has ever
been done about it, despite much discussion on the subject.  It's a shame that
one has to patch pppd to get it to work (well, okay, you can get it to work
with the appropriate flag in /etc/ttys, but that makes it ignore carrier
totally, and that sucks as well).

--Ken