15 September, 2001 - James McQuillan

This startsess program was written to invoke a shell for an LTSP
workstation.

It is needed, because we found that if you spawn a shell directly
from /sbin/init, it won't handle the Ctrl-C key properly.  In fact,
it won't handle the following signals:

    SIGINT, SIGQUIT or SIGTSTP.

In the kernel, there is a file called n_tty.c, which is the
part of the tty driver that handles those signals.  If
the Process Group Id is <= 0, then it won't pass those signals
on to the process that is running.

So, the startsess program takes care of creating a new session,
and assigning a Process Group ID to it.  it then execs the 
shell.  Actually, it will exec whatever you pass to it on the
command line.
