WSIRIS(1) — Silicon Graphics

NAME

wsiris − emulate an IRIS terminal on an IRIS workstation

SYNOPSIS

wsiris [ −bhiprxy ] [ −e c ] [ −l line ] [ −s speed ] [ hostname ]

DESCRIPTION

Wsiris allows a workstation to emulate an IRIS terminal communicating with the remote host hostname. Series 1000 workstations will emulate series 1000 terminals, and series 2000 workstations will emulate series 2000 terminals. Communications to the remote system are via Ethernet using XNS or IP/TCP procotols, or, if the hostname is ‘serial’, a full- or half-duplex serial line. If no hostname argument is given, wsiris prompts for one.

The options are:

−b Interpret ginit(3G) commands as gbegin(3G)’s. This option is ignored on series 1000 workstations.

−e c Set the escape character from the default ‘~’ to c. Lines beginning with the escape character are given special treatment (see below). If c is ‘none’, there will be no escape character.

−h Use half-duplex serial communications. The default is full-duplex.

−i When using Ethernet communications, an XNS connection to hostname is attempted first. If that fails, a connection using IP/TCP is then attempted. Giving the −i option causes an IP/TCP connection to be tried first.

−l line Use device line for the serial connection. Line must begin with either ‘/dev/’ or ‘tty’. The default line is ‘/dev/ttyd2’ (port 3).

−p Print textport output even when the textport has been turned off. By default, after the receipt of a tpoff(3G) command from the remote system, all textport output is thrown away until a tpon(3G) is received. The −p option inhibits this, and characters written to the textport will appear when it is turned on again.

−r Convert NL to CR-NL (for VMS connections).

−s speed Use speed baud for serial communications. See stty(1) for the allowed values. The default is 9600 baud.

−x When read from the standard input the characters XON (CTRL/Q) and XOFF (CTRL/S) are normally not sent to the remote system, but are used locally to stop and restart the display. This action can be prevented by specifying the −x option. When using serial communications, this flag also inhibits the use of these characters by the serial driver for flow control of data received from the host.

−y By default, wsiris expects the remote system to issue XON/XOFF commands to control output from the IRIS. The −y option tells it not to use this protocol and to treat these characters as ordinary data.

The contents of a file ‘.wsirisrc’ in your home directory, if there is one, are used as additional arguments to those on the command line. This action will not occur if the program name begins with a ‘−’, i.e. ‘−wsiris’.

After making the remote connection, wsiris runs as two processes: the transmit process reads data from the standard input and, except for lines beginning with the escape character, passes them to the remote system; the receive process accepts data from the remote system, interpreting graphics commands and passing textport characters to the standard output. In half-duplex mode, the receive process accepts its input from: a pipe which is written to by the transmit process and by a third process which does the reading of data from the remote system. Closing the remote connection, e.g. by logging out, will cause all wsiris processes to exit.

When the escape character ‘~’ appears at the beginning of a line the transmit process makes the following interpretations:

~. Force wsiris to exit. Ethernet connections are closed, but serial ones may remain open.

~! Escape to an interactive shell on the local system. The value of the environment variable SHELL determines which shell is executed. If wsiris finds the environment variable CMDNAME is set, this local shell will have it set to
wsiris:hostname
This is useful for altering shell prompts so that you are aware that you are in a sub-shell. Exiting the shell returns you to the remote host.

~p Toggle the value of the −p option.

~x Toggle the value of the −x option. The use, or non-use, of XON and XOFF by the serial driver for flow control is not affected.

~BREAK If using serial communications, send a break character.

~~ Send a single ‘~’.

The escape character can be changed from ‘~’ with the −e option. If −e none is given, there is no escape character and none of the above interpretations occur. In this case, note that there is no way to force wsiris to exit.

Whenever the IRIS is accepting graphics commands, the receive process locks the keyboard, and input from it is thrown away. To force a character through, such as the interrupt character to kill the remote program, prefix it with the escape character.

IRIS terminals suffer from the problem of having textport output interfere with graphics. If something is printed within a graphics program, either the textport pops up and destroys the image, or the textport and the graphics viewport must be carefully arranged so that there is no interference. This problem can eliminated when using wsiris by invoking it from an ASCII terminal connected to one of the other serial ports instead of from the console. When this is done, the ASCII terminal is used for textport input and output, while the graphics appear unchanged on the console. Note that the Graphics Library keyboard device will still be the console keyboard.

FILES

~/.wsirisrcfile containing default arguments

BUGS

Wsiris is only as robust as any other workstation graphics program. In particular, if the remote program tells it to execute a graphics command without have first sent it a ginit(3G), the receive process will core dump. Normally, this causes the transmit process to be killed, but in some cases it may still be active, happily accepting keyboard input which should be going to the shell. Should this happen, execute ps(1) on another terminal to find its process number and kill(1) to kill it. If half-duplex serial communications were being used, there will be two processes to kill. You may also have to use reset(1) to put the terminal back into a sensible state − see its manual page for directions.

Version 2.3 — July 04, 1985

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