Many years ago I cobbled together something together to open a serial port for communicating with the consoles of some SGI boxes. It just opened a device at a particular baud rate, hooked my terminal to the serial port, and got out of the way. Ran it something like the following, then pressing tilde then period to exit.
serial /dev/tty01 19200
A little later I found myself working with embedded devices, essentially
prototype phones. Many modern smartphones have a serial console
bootloader mode in which you can update the firmware, debug flash
memory, and things like that. You can bring up at least some phones
by HTC, for example, while pressing the phone’s camera button, and it
will automatically export a USB serial device on the mini-USB port.
So I rigged the serial program to run under Linux and added very
rudimentary support for macros. It helped greatly to have macros since
I was repeatedly issuing very similar, very arcane bootloader commands.
I used to use minicom from Linux as a serial port terminal, but I found
it was too sophisticated for my regular use. Minicom has a deep menu
system for configuring everything about the serial port from stop bits
to send-expect dialing scripts. Most annoyingly, though, it takes over
the screen. So I found I was using this junky little program instead of
minicom.
At AMD, I found myself multibooting often between variants of Windows
and Linux operating systems. When I was in the office, it was easy to
lean over to the machine in question and select the right entry from
GRUB, the Gnu boot loader. But I worked at home sometimes and needed to
reboot the machine into a different operating system from time to time.
GRUB has the ability to use a serial port as its terminal. So I had
hooked the test machine to my desktop Linux workstation. On the Linux
workstation, I ran serial to connect to GRUB.
I can think of several things that could be improved or fixed. Submit a
pull request. As one example, it probably would be cleaner if it used
STL vectors and maps. As another, it has a nearly-400-line main(),
which we all know is sacrilege. But it’s an essential workhorse
for me now, any time I have to interface to a serial port. I haven’t
provided a Makefile for it since it seems to build on Linux, MacOS,
and Cygwin without warnings just using
CFLAGS="--std=c++11 -Wall make serial"
and the default make settings. Run serial without arguments to see
a basic help message.
(One thing it really needs is the ability to change the escape character
from tilde to something else. I find myself logging out of ssh more
often than I’d like when I really meant to just disconnect from the
serial port.)
May 9th, 2010
Joost Bruynooghe pointed out that I was missing an argument in a printf on line 143, and that could conceivably have lead to junk output or possibly a crash. The code was not compiling without warnings. I have updated the source code with his fix. Thanks, Joost!
June 18th, 2022
Chris Browning mentioned serial in a
StackOverflow post
many years ago. He posted his version with a bug fix at
https://github.com/lime45/serial .
