Hardware Abstraction
Operating systems usually use a symbolic name to refer to the serial ports of a computer.
Unix-like operating systems usually label the serial port devices /dev/tty* (TTY is a common trademark-free abbreviation for teletype) where * represents a string identifying the terminal device; the syntax of that string depends on the operating system and the device. On Linux, 8250/16550 UART hardware serial ports are named /dev/ttyS*, USB adapters appear as /dev/ttyUSB* and various types of virtual serial ports do not necessarily have names starting with tty.
The Microsoft MS-DOS and Windows environments refer to serial ports as COM ports: COM1, COM2,..etc.
Read more about this topic: Serial Port, Hardware
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