.\" Copyright (c) 1993 Michael Haardt (michael@moria.de), .\" Fri Apr 2 11:32:09 MET DST 1993 .\" .\" SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later .\" .\" Modified 1993-07-24 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" Modified 2003-04-07 by Michael Kerrisk .\" .TH tty 4 2024-05-02 "Linux man-pages 6.9.1" .SH NAME tty \- controlling terminal .SH DESCRIPTION The file .I /dev/tty is a character file with major number 5 and minor number 0, usually with mode 0666 and ownership root:tty. It is a synonym for the controlling terminal of a process, if any. .P In addition to the .BR ioctl (2) requests supported by the device that .B tty refers to, the .BR ioctl (2) request .B TIOCNOTTY is supported. .SS TIOCNOTTY Detach the calling process from its controlling terminal. .P If the process is the session leader, then .B SIGHUP and .B SIGCONT signals are sent to the foreground process group and all processes in the current session lose their controlling tty. .P This .BR ioctl (2) call works only on file descriptors connected to .IR /dev/tty . It is used by daemon processes when they are invoked by a user at a terminal. The process attempts to open .IR /dev/tty . If the open succeeds, it detaches itself from the terminal by using .BR TIOCNOTTY , while if the open fails, it is obviously not attached to a terminal and does not need to detach itself. .SH FILES .I /dev/tty .SH SEE ALSO .BR chown (1), .BR mknod (1), .BR ioctl (2), .BR ioctl_console (2), .BR ioctl_tty (2), .BR termios (3), .BR ttyS (4), .BR vcs (4), .BR pty (7), .BR agetty (8), .BR mingetty (8)