Guardian Programmer's Guide

Table Of Contents
Guardian Programmer’s Guide 421922-014
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10
Communicating With Terminals
This section describes how an application process can communicate with a terminal
using file-system procedure calls. The file system can communicate with any terminal
whose characteristics can be defined to the system through one of the programs that
can configure devices, such as the system-generation program, SYSGEN. Refer to
the System Generation Manual for Terminals and Printers.
Specifically, this section describes the following topics:
How to access a terminal: how to open a terminal and how to perform I/O with an
open terminal
How to communicate with a terminal in conversational mode
How to communicate with a terminal in page mode
How to manage the BREAK key
How to recover from errors
For a complete discussion of the programmatic interface to a terminal, refer to the
appropriate terminal manual; for example, the 653X Multi-Page Terminal Programmer’s
Guide.
Accessing a Terminal
This subsection discusses how to perform basic I/O operations with a terminal as well
as how to control general terminal characteristics. The following topics are discussed:
How to open a terminal for access
How to transfer data between a computer system and a terminal
How to time out a user response
How to control text echo to the terminal
How to set the mode of data transfer: conversational or page mode
How to terminate terminal access
The use of the BREAK key is not discussed here. The BREAK key is described later in
this section in Managing the BREAK Key.