Help needed doing raw term i/o under Unix

[Jeff Noxon]

I need to be able to do unbuffered, raw, terminal i/o from C under Unix.
The get character routine must NOT wait for a character if one is not
available.  This will be done under System V but it should be portable to
as many unix systems as possible.

I am writing a gateway program so that Unix can talk to the ProLine
BBS software which supports 822 messages but has it's own idea of how it
should transfer files.  I have been able to accomplish raw i/o however
I am unable to determine if a character is waiting in the input buffer.
Another method would be to have the get character routine aborted by
an interrupt or something if a character is not provided in a short amount
of time.  This is necessary for the initial handshaking between systems.

Since I program mostly on micros, I have never had to worry about doing
something that is seemingly so simple before.

Anyway, if anyone has a routine or set of routines or something that provides
this sort of i/o capabilities in C I would appreciate it if you would drop
me a note (I don't read this newsgroup).

Thanks in advance!
Jeff

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