picocom 1.4 review

As its name suggests, picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 40K Developer: Nick Patavalis

0

As its name suggests, picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program. It is, in principle, very much like minicom, only it's pico instead of mini! It was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem configuration, testing, and debugging tool.

It has also served (quite well) as a low-tech "terminal-window" to allow operator intervention in PPP connection scripts (something like the ms-windows "open terminal window before / after dialing" feature).

It could also prove useful in many other similar tasks. It is ideal for embedded systems since its memory footprint is minimal (less than 20K, when stripped). Apart from being a handy little tool, picocom source distribution includes a simple, easy to use, and thoroughly documented terminal-management library, which could serve other projects as well.

This library hides the termios(3) calls, and provides a less complex and safer (though certainly less feature-rich) interface. "picocom" runs on Linux, and with minor modifications it could run on any Unix system with the termios(3) library.

What's New in This Release:
Changed the behavior of the C-a command. Now pressing C-a twice sends C-a to the serial port (instead of simply leaving picocom in command mode).
Added the C- command that generates a break sequence
Fixed some minor BSD protability issues
Added (optinal) UUCP-lockfiles support