>I seem to remember W. R. Stevens having a C subroutine to allocate a
>master/slave pty pair based on the master side being an exclusive
>open, but I don't recall one in libc.  Is there such a creature?

openpty(3).

david curry's book "using c on the unix system" has a nice example of
it as well.  unfortunately that book is out of the print and the new
edition is called "unix systems programming for svr4" and doesn't have
as much bsd stuff in it.

-- 
|-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----|
codewarrior@daemon.org             * "ah!  i see you have the internet
twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown)                that goes *ping*!"
andrew@crossbar.com       * "information is power -- share the wealth."