It's hard for me to imagine any strong Unix systems engineer that knows nothing about that topic. The whole tty subsystem is one of the core parts of *nix syste

It's hard for me to imagine any strong Unix systems engineer that knows nothing about that topic. The whole tty subsystem is one of the core parts of *nix systems, and basic knowledge of it is required for many complex debugging questions. And the open ended question is great because it allows candidate to showcase what they know. Have no idea how PTYs are allocated by kernel? No problem, you can talk how shells work.