curious about "> /dev/tty#" in /etc/rc.sysinit

[Bill Nottingham]

Robert P. J. Day (rpjday at mindspring.com) said: 
>   i was just perusing the /etc/rc.sysinit file to get a better
> understanding of the intricacies of the boot process (yes, i need
> a life), and noticed early on a loop that runs
> 
>   > /dev/tty1
>   > /dev/tty2
> 
> and so on.  this is, of course, long before the mingetty
> processes are started, so i'm curious as to what these null
> redirections are doing.

It opens the device, so that that tty is initialized, so
that when the unicode font is set, the translation table
carries across to all the ttys you're going to use.

Bill