"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: getpt() is not a convinience routine. It is required for UNIX98 PTY emulation with glibc 2.1 on Linux 2.0. There's no master PTY device on such systems. Other system do support these PTY style, but the master PTY device is named differently, and some systems require special STREAMS setup stuff. Finally, HP-UX grantpt() doesn't do what the manpage says. As a result, when I wrote the patch for GNU Emacs, I discarded the idea of unifying UNIX98 PTY support. It would still require a bunch of #defines and would be nearly as ugly as the current solution (on GNU Emacs). (Due to legal reasons, GNU Emacs does not ship with the RUS-CERT patch.) -- Florian Weimer Florian.Weimer(a)RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE University of Stuttgart http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/ RUS-CERT +49-711-685-5973/fax +49-711-685-5898 http://ca.uni-stuttgart.de:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xC06EC3B5