Capturing keycodes in shell?

Question

I am writing my own shell and need to implement a history feature where up and down arrow keys show history of commands executed. I need to find out when up and down keys are pressed.

How do i do this?

Answer 1

you want to be capturing input in raw mode. this can get kinda complicated, but here's an example that should get you on the right path:

http://docs.linux.cz/programming/c/unix%5Fexamples/raw.html

i'm assuming you're writing your shell in c. if you're using a more high-level language, there might be an easy way to get raw input. in python, for instance, i would use the ncurses module.