Cancel respawn getty on serial tty

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 12:40 AM, Rod Nussbaumer <bomr at triumf.ca> wrote:
> I have a setup that uses busybox as the init process. It works fine, and
> is configured to spawn/respawn a getty on ttyS0. Sometimes, however, I
> would prefer to cancel the getty process on the serial port, in order to
> use the serial port for other purposes, such as setting up a C-kermit
> connection on the port. Ideally, I'd like to then restart the getty
> respawning when I'm done with the port.
>
> How can I do this without modifying inittab and rebooting?

If you need this kind of finer control of starting/stopping
of services, use runsvdir tool instead of init.

For an example, download busybox tarball and look into
examples/var_service/ directory:

* README file explains how to start runsvdir on
  /var/service at boot.

* getty_tty1/ directory contains an example   how to run a getty
  under runsvdir. If you want to run several, you just need
  to make copies of this dir: getty_tty2, getty_ttyS0 etc.

Then, stopping/starting of a service is trivially easy:
sv d /var/service/getty_tty1
sv u /var/service/getty_tty1

-- 
vda