TTYs
May 13, 2025
Today I learned about the tty command. It returns the current user’s terminal name.
TTY(1) General Commands Manual TTY(1)
NAME
tty – return user's terminal name
SYNOPSIS
tty [-s]
DESCRIPTION
The tty utility writes the name of the terminal attached to standard
input to standard output. The name that is written is the string
returned by ttyname(3). If the standard input is not a terminal, the
message “not a tty” is written. The options are as follows:
-s Do not write the terminal name; only the exit status is affected
when this option is specified. The -s option is deprecated in
favor of the “test -t 0” command.
EXIT STATUS
The tty utility exits 0 if the standard input is a terminal, 1 if the
standard input is not a terminal, and >1 if an error occurs.
One cool thing I found was if you get the tty of a terminal tab, you can push text to it. For instance, running echo "some text" > /dev/tty-{num} will push the text some text to the terminal with the tty.
