As its name suggests, picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation pro- gram. It is, in principle, very much like minicom(1) , only it's "pico" instead of "mini"! It was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem configuration, testing, and debugging tool. It has also served (quite well) as a low-tech "terminal-window" to allow operator intervention in PPP connection scripts (something like the ms-windows "open terminal window before / after dialing" feature). It could also prove useful in many other similar tasks. WWW: http://efault.net/npat/hacks/picocom/