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.

External links

• tip man page
• NetBSD source to tip