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Comment by oarsinsync | Hacker News Reader

Also, try `screen`

  screen /dev/ttyS0 
  screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

You can specify baud rate (defaults to 9600), and a number of other parameters. Some of these are nicely documented at https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-apple-osx-bsd-scree... if you dislike reading the entire man page for screen(1).

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One issue with using screen for these purposes is that it will silently drop \xFF bytes. In my case I was trying to pull an image off of an Arduino or RPI connected camera, and my images would arrive like 99% accurate (mostly correct headers etc) but would not open in any image viewing program. Took a long time before I realized that transferring the data via screen was causing the corruption.

That's somewhat curious. Do you know why screen does anything special with 11111111?

I imagine many will go see if tmux does it as well. Tmux appears to not want that feature: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1862

I agree with the assertion by the tmux maintainers that screen probably shouldn't do it either.

whats the advantage over just using something like cu inside a tmux window?

https://man.openbsd.org/cu.1

The problem with this, and likely why the post was made in the first place, is screen and many other solutions are basically just a terminal emulator on your existing terminal emulator and may cause problems. screen for instance seems to make snippets I use to resize serial terminals nonfunctional, likely because it does not implement things the same as xterm-like terminals.

If you want neither Minicom nor Screen, and Socat is a bit too minimal, there is dterm[1]

[1] http://www.knossos.net.nz/resources/free-software/dterm

On the other end of the scale, if minicom doesn't have enough features, there's Kermit. Especially handy if you need to script "expect" style functionality over serial. http://www.kermitproject.org/

For a standard serial terminal I also really like the `miniterm.py` script that is included with the PySerial Python package.

    miniterm.py /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

It's just a basic serial terminal but it covers all of my use cases (mostly interfacing with embedded devices).

There's a very nice write up about the socat command line interface here [1] in case anyone is interested.

[1] https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/socat-29453e9fc8a6

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