Tip (unix utility)

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 operating systems 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.

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

The tip command line options are as follows.

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

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

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:

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.

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