odd behavior in read

[Steve Dyer]

The behavior of read() you describe, while very unBerkeleylike, is not
a bug in your particular version of UNIX 386; it's the behavior you'd get
in any version of UNIX other than 4.[23], including V6 and V7.  Trouble is,
now in S5 you can specify to the TTY driver the minimum number of chars to
wait for and/or a time to wait.  This is different from RAW and CBREAK
modes in V7-derived UNIX systems, whose semantics always guarantee that a single
character (or -1) is returned, and doesn't mesh well with the older handling
of signals.  Why don't you try setting the minimum number of chars to wait to 1,
to get the same behavior as a V7 system?  This should make Jove work as well as
any screen editor did under V7.
-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at harvard.harvard.edu
dyer at spdcc.COM aka {ihnp4,harvard,husc6,linus,ima,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!dyer