Thanks to all who replied!
This turned out to be an application problem due to the legacy device
naming support.
ttyp4 is the old name for pts/4 under v5 unix. A v5 compiled program had
grabbed pts/4 but had not locked /dev/ttyp4 so screen (and the echo
example) were getting contention for the device.
The fix was quite simple - recompile screen under version 5, and
everything works OK.
By the way for those of you who don't know "screen" allows you to run
multiple windows within a shell. This is great if you need to monitor a
process / log file from multiple locations as you can detact the screen
session from one window and re-attach it to another. It's available from
any GNU mirror...
Regards,
Jonathan
!---------------------------------------------------------------------------
= Jonathan Nicholson - Team Leader : System Support "Special Projects" =
= The Sanger Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambs, CB10 1SA =
= Email: jjn_at_sanger.ac.uk -=- Tel: 01223 834244 x4987 -=- Fax: 01223 494919 =
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Received on Sun Mar 18 2001 - 08:59:27 NZST