I seek a GNU Common LISP package which implements forkpty(); openpty() would also be a big plus, and login_tty() would be a luxury I could live with. (Duckduckgo, Google, etc. were of no help.)

Have you tried using the foreign function interface? I can't find any docs on it - if you can bear using clisp they have a well-documented ffi that I find fairly easy to use.

1 members found this post helpful.

and did you try the lisp mailing list? http://www.faqs.org/faqs/lisp-faq/part4/section-9.html

1 members found this post helpful.

John and Anisha, thanks to you both. My goal is to be able to use LISP as a full-bodied replacement for C, at least in some applications. Unfortunately, I seem to have run up against a limitation of GNU Common Lisp which I discuss here. I'm anticipating that in response to my bug report they'll say "Ignoring signal SIGCLD except during (posix:wait) is not a bug, it's a feature."

If that ends up being the case, I'll continue using LISP as merely a back-end data processor with which my main process will communicate via pseudoteletype and files. A pity, really. If that happens, I'll not invest the time investigating FFI. Sigh.