2.4 KiB
#picocom Minimal dumb-terminal emulator
by Nick Patavalis (npat@efault.net)
The latest release can be downloaded from:
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 (approximately 30K, 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 no or 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.
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.
Compilation / Installation
Change into picocom's source directory and say:
make
This will be enough to compile picocom for most Unix-like systems. If you want, you can then strip the resulting binary like this:
strip picocom
and copy it, as well as the man-page, to wherever you put your binaries and man-pages. For example:
cp picocom ~/bin
cp picocom.8 ~/man/man8
If something goes wrong and picocom can't compile cleanly, or if it's lacking a feature you need, take a look at the included Makefile. It's very simple and easy to understand. It allows you to select compile-time options and enable or disable some compile-time features by commenting in or out the respective lines.