Charles M. Hannum said:
   > It normally waits for carrier on open.

   Why? The same command works fine with the Amiga port.

The Amiga serial drivers appear to try to support `dialout' devices by
setting `softcar' mode when the high bit of the minor number used to
open the device is 0.  This is definitely not the right way to do it,
as a carrier drop on the modem will be ignored.

The `right' thing is for programs which want to `dial out' to use
O_NONBLOCK mode.