
picocom

by Nick Patavalis (npat@efault.net)

As its name suggests, [picocom] is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation
program. It is, in principle, very much like minicom, only it's "pico"
instead of "mini"! It was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem
configuration, testing, and debugging tool. It has also served (quite
well) as a low-tech "terminal-window" to allow operator intervention
in PPP connection scripts (something like the ms-windows "open
terminal window before / after dialing" feature). It could also prove
useful in many other similar tasks. It is ideal for embedded systems
since its memory footprint is minimal (less than 20K, when
stripped). Apart from being a handy little tool, [picocom] source
distribution includes a simple, easy to use, and thoroughly documented
terminal-management library, which could serve other projects as
well. This library hides the termios(3) calls, and provides a less
complex and safer (though certainly less feature-rich)
interface. [picocom] runs on Linux, and with minor modifications it
could run on any Unix system with the termios(3) library.

For a description of picocom's operation, its command line options,
and usage examples, see the manual page included in the source
distribution as "picocom.8", and also html-ized as "picocom.8.html".

People who have contibuted to picocom, by offering feature
implementations, bug-fixes, corrections, and suggestions are listed in
the "CONTRIBUTORS" file.

The latest version of "picocom" can be downloaded from:

  http://efault.net/npat/hacks/picocom/

Please feel free to send comments, requests for new features (no
promisses, though!), bug-fixes and rants, to the author's email
address shown at the top of this file.
