Not sure from your question, whether you are only looking for resources on TTYs, or general resources on writing a Unix shell. If the latter, this book is quit

Not sure from your question, whether you are only looking for resources on TTYs, or general resources on writing a Unix shell. If the latter, this book is quite good: Search for "advanced unix programming marc rochkind" and also see this specific page (it's one of the hits of that search): http://basepath.com/aup/ http://basepath.com/aup/ I had read it some years ago. (It used to come bundled with HP-UX servers and workstations, and I was working in an HP joint venture, so got to read it and try out some of the stuff.) Thought it was really good. Gave a lot of insights into appropriate use of Unix system calls. An example used in the book is creating a simple shell (covers right ways to fork, exec, dup, set up pipes with the pipe system call, etc.). (IIRC, there's even another one about creating a simple client-server DBMS!) And IIRC, he showed a good bit about writing code portable between different versions of Unix, in a sane way.