[BusyBox] inittab: askfirst vs. respawn problem

[Mark Jessee]

I'm fairly new to Busybox and am trying to setup my x86 single-board
computer. I want the inittab to start an askfirst getty on the main
system console (tty1?). When I try to do this I get the error message:

-sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

If I set any other tty (tty2-4 on my system) to askfirst there is no
error message.

I've searched the mailing list archives and this is mentioned in a few
places, but I still can't seem to figure this out. In the inittab if I
replace "askfirst" with "respawn", it works fine.

Any ideas? I do want to have the getty on the system console, vs. just
going directly to the shell as in the example provided in the Busybox
documentation. Having askfirst would be nice as well.

My inittab looks like this:

::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS

tty1::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 vt100
# changing the above "respawn" to "askfirst" gives
# the "job control turned off" error
tty2::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2 vt100
tty3::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3 vt100
tty4::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4 vt100

# Stuff to do when restarting the init process
::restart:/sbin/init

# Stuff to do before rebooting
::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/reboot
::shutdown:/bin/umount -a -r
::shutdown:/sbin/swapoff -a

Any help is appreciated!
Thanks,
Mark