Using a USB to Serial Adapter in OSX with Terminal.app


So, I have this mac. I wanted to connect via the USB-to-Serial adapter I have so that I can connect to switches and all that without using SecureCRT, or a virtual machine or something like that.

Turns out its pretty easy.
The devices available are listed in:

/dev/tty.*

Just list the contents of that folder with the tty being filtered like this:

ls /dev/tty.*

You’ll get some output that might look familiar:

/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem
/dev/tty.usbserial
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync

Then you can identify which session you might want to use, and then open a ‘screen‘ to the connection.

screen /dev/tty.usbserial

There you have it!

You can see the ‘screen’ link above for a list of screen commands and how to use screen if you aren’t familiar.