Tip (Unix utility)

For other uses, see tip (disambiguation).

tip is a Unix utility for establishing a terminal connection to a remote system via a modem. It is commonly associated with BSD Unix, as well as other UNIX flavours such as Sun's Solaris. It was originally included with 4.2BSD.

Tip is referred to in the Solaris documentation as the preferred terminal emulator to connect to a Sun workstation's serial port for maintenance purposes, for example to configure the OpenPROM firmware. A reasonable freely-available equivalent is the cu utility from Taylor UUCP.

Basics

Tip is one of the commands referenced in the expect reference book by Don Libes.

The tip command line options are as follows.

    tip [-v] [-speed-entry] {hostname | phone-number | device}

    use ~. to exit

    use ~# to break aka: Stop-A on a Sun keyboard

    use ~? to list all commands

The cu command line is more extensive than the above, but includes

    cu [-v] [--speed bps] [--line device] {hostname | phone-number}

Examples

This Expect script is a simple example that establishes a terminal session:

spawn tip modem
expect "connected"
send "ATD$argc\r"
set timeout 30
expect "CONNECT"

As tip does not have the built-in logging capabilities that Minicom has, we need to use some other means to record the session. One way is to use script:

$ script -a install.log
Script started, file is install.log
$ tip hardwire
[tip session takes place]
$ exit
Script done, file is install.log
$

and so on. In the above example, run on a Sun SPARC 20 workstation running Solaris 9, we first create a log file called install.log in the current directory using script and then tell tip to use serial port B.

References

Libes, Don (1995). Exploring Expect: A Tcl-Based Tool for Automating Interactive Programs. O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ISBN 1-56592-090-2.

External links

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix commands

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