Startsess

This Startsess program was written to invoke a shell for an LTSP workstation.

It is needed, because we found that if you spawn a shell directly from /sbin/init, it won't handle the Ctrl-C key properly. In fact, it won't handle the following signals:

SIGINT, SIGQUIT or SIGTSTP.

In the kernel, there is a file called n_tty.c, which is the part of the tty driver that handles those signals. If the Process Group Id is <= 0, then it won't pass those signals on to the process that is running.

So, the Startsess program takes care of creating a new session, and assigning a Process Group ID to it. it then execs the shell. Actually, it will exec whatever you pass to it on the command line.

-- NickTaylor - 07 Jun 2005