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://code.google.com/p/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.