Character-device drivers

When you type a command, the first process that interprets it is the character-device driver. The driver that you use depends on your hardware; for more information, see the entries for the devc-* character I/O drivers in the Utilities Reference.

Some keys may behave differently from how they're described here, depending on how you configure your system.

Related links

  • Using the Command Line

    Like QNX 4, UNIX, and DOS, Neutrino is based on a command-line interface that you might want or need to use instead of the GUI.

  • Input modes

    Character-device drivers run in either raw input mode, or canonical (or edited input) mode. In raw input mode, each character is submitted to an application process as it's received; in edited input mode, the application process receives characters only after a whole line has been entered (usually signalled by a carriage return).

  • Terminal support

    Some programs, such as vi, need to know just what your terminal can do, so that they can move the cursor, clear the screen, and so on. The TERM environment variable indicates the type of terminal that you're using, and the /usr/lib/terminfo directory is the terminal database. In this directory, you can find subdirectories (a through z) that contain the information for specific terminals. Some applications use /etc/termcap, the older single-file database model, instead of /usr/lib/terminfo.

  • Telnet

    If you're using telnet to communicate between two QNX machines (QNX 4 or Neutrino), use the -8 option to enable an eight-bit data path. If you're connecting to a Neutrino box from some other operating system, and the terminal isn't behaving properly, quit from telnet and start it again with the -8 option.

  • The keyboard at a glance

    The table below describes how the character-device drivers interpret various keys and keychords (groups of keys that you press simultaneously). The drivers handle these keys as soon as you type them.