OS - Console (Local terminal)

About

The console is a character-based console device.

A console is connected to the keyboard and display from which it was launched.

Console historically meant the keyboard and monitor physically attached to the computer.

Generally when the standard stream are available, we have a console connection.

Console are not shell.

A command line interpreter will typically redirects the standard input and output streams to the console (except if its script is started by a job scheduler)

A console application is working with in/out streams and (usually) do not have any graphical interface.

A console window is known as a local terminal

When user starts a terminal, it runs some console application (ie command line interpreter)

Software / Example

Application

• cmd.exe,
• powershell.exe,
• bash.sh
• sh.exe,
• dism.exe,
• java.exe (but not javaw.exe),
• python.exe,
• telnet.exe
• Cmder: console emulator

Terminal

Why Text to Console is slow

Why is stdout attached to the console so slow

• The bytes have to be sent to the console application (should be quite fast)
• Each char has to be rendered using (usually) a true type font (that's pretty slow)
• The displayed area may have to be scrolled in order to append a new line to the visible area (best case: bit block transfer operation, worst case: re-rendering of the complete text area)