Small program to monitor USB port and not quit when flashing firmware

General
1

As much as I enjoy developing on Particle’s Photon and Core with OTA programming, one thing I’ve always hated is the fact that “screen” or “particle monitor” quits when the device is reprogrammed. This happens on other devices too, like Teensy or Arduino, when they are reset. This occurs because the USB device disconnects and the /dev/cu.usbmodemXXX device disappears, and is recreated later when the part restarts.

So, I wrote this tiny program to be robust to that, and just keep retrying to open the device if it goes away. The effect is you can keep a terminal window open at all times watching the output without having to touch it when reprogramming.

I’ve only ever tested this on OSX, but it would probably work on Linux with some minor modifications, if someone wants to try it out.

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2

I too found the disconnection issue a real pain, so your program is a saviour. To get this to build on Linux (Mint 18.3) I had to remove the flock(fd, LOCK_UN ); statement which I understand probably has little or no effect anyway. Great work and thank you!

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