The ct utility dials the telephone number of a modem that is attached to a terminal and spawns a login process to that terminal. The telno is a telephone number, with equal signs for secondary dial tones and minus signs for delays at appropriate places. (The set of legal characters for telno is 0 through 9, -, =, *, and #. The maximum length telno is 31 characters). If more than one telephone number is specified, ct will try each in succession until one answers; this is useful for specifying alternate dialing paths.

ct will try each line listed in the file /etc/uucp/Devices until it finds an available line with appropriate attributes, or runs out of entries.

After the user on the destination terminal logs out, there are two things that could occur depending on what type of port monitor is monitoring the port. In the case of no port monitor, ct prompts: Reconnect? If the response begins with the letter n, the line will be dropped; otherwise, ttymon will be started again and the login: prompt will be printed. In the second case, where a port monitor is monitoring the port, the port monitor reissues the login: prompt.

The user should log out properly before disconnecting.

The following options are supported:

-h

Normally, ct will hang up the current line so that it can be used to answer the incoming call. The -h option will prevent this action. The -h option will also wait for the termination of the specified ct process before returning control to the user's terminal.

-sspeed

The data rate may be set with the -s option. speed is expressed in baud rates. The default baud rate is 1200.

-v

If the -v (verbose) option is used, ct will send a running narrative to the standard error output stream.

-wn

If there are no free lines ct will ask if it should wait, and for how many minutes, before it gives up. ct will continue to try to open the dialers at one-minute intervals until the specified limit is exceeded. This dialogue may be overridden by specifying the -wn option. n is the maximum number of minutes that ct is to wait for a line.

-xn

This option is used for debugging; it produces a detailed output of the program execution on stderr. n is a single number between 0 and 9. As n increases to 9, more detailed debugging information is given.

/etc/uucp/Devices

/var/adm/ctlog

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

cu(1C), login(1), uucp(1C), ttymon(1M), attributes(5)

The ct program will not work with a DATAKIT Multiplex interface.

For a shared port, one used for both dial-in and dial-out, the ttymon program running on the line must have the -r and -b options specified (see ttymon(1M)).