With the help of @lzh on #perl I got this peace : $ perl -we '$tty=qx(tty);$tty=~s/.*d...(.*)/$1/;print $tty' to yield the pts/# out of tty's output(/dev/pts/#). I was just wondering if anyone would come up with something different or even faster. I have question though, why is $1 better than \1? \1 works, but Perl suggest using $1.

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.