Very early in the boot process, before the getty etc are fired up, I want to fire up a process that talks over a full tty. What state it leaves the console after it has finished is irrelevant - the process will finish with a reboot. I've had some element of success with openvt and screen (and running stty sane in the subshell), but they're not particularly neat, and neither of them propogate the exit value from the last command executed. And my google fu is still failing me. Anyone any idea of a simple .c program or the like that can initialise the tty into a semi-sane state and talking over /dev/tty will do the expected thing? Running 'tty' this early in the process tells me my tty device is /dev/console, but it doesn't behave like a tty, in that rlwrap fails to do the expected thing 'rlwrap: Could not open /dev/tty: No such device or address' (yes, /dev/tty is c 5 0) -- Tim Connors