Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Section 18.1.  Introduction...

18.1. Introduction The handling of terminal I/O is a messy area, regardless of the operating system. The UNIX System is no exception. The manual page for...

18.2. Overview Terminal I/O has two modes: Canonical mode input processing. In this mode, terminal input is processed as lines. The terminal driver returns at most one...

18.3. Special Input Characters POSIX.1 defines 11 characters that are handled specially on input. Implementations define additional special characters. Figure summarizes these special characters. Figure 18.9. Summary...

18.4. Getting and Setting Terminal Attributes To get and set a termios structure, we call two functions: tcgetattr and tcsetattr. This is how we examine and...

18.5. Terminal Option Flags In this section, we list all the various terminal option flags, expanding the descriptions of all the options from Figures through 18.6....

18.6. stty Command All the options described in the previous section can be examined and changed from within a program, with the tcgetattr and tcsetattr functions...

18.7. Baud Rate Functions The term baud rate is a historical term that should be referred to today as "bits per second." Although most terminal devices...

18.8. Line Control Functions The following four functions provide line control capability for terminal devices. All four require that filedes refer to a terminal device; otherwise,...

18.9. Terminal Identification Historically, the name of the controlling terminal in most versions of the UNIX System has been /dev/tty. POSIX.1 provides a runtime function that...

18.10. Canonical Mode Canonical mode is simple: we issue a read, and the terminal driver returns when a line has been entered. Several conditions cause the...

18.11. Noncanonical Mode Noncanonical mode is specified by turning off the ICANON flag in the c_lflag field of the termios structure. In noncanonical mode, the input...

18.12. Terminal Window Size Most UNIX systems provide a way to keep track of the current terminal window size and to have the kernel notify the...

18.13. termcap, terminfo, and curses termcap stands for "terminal capability," and it refers to the text file /etc/termcap and a set of routines to read this...

18.14. Summary Terminals have many features and options, most of which we're able to change to suit our needs. In this chapter, we've described numerous functions...

18.1Write a program that calls tty_raw and terminates (without resetting the terminal mode). If your system provides the reset(1) command (all four systems described in...