Here's the skinny. What I REALLY want to do is just cat the file /dev/ttyS0 and read the resulting ascii characters one line at a time. I have already thought about just capturing a buffered stream of characters, which is what I'm going to do next (Just use sysopen and sysread, then capture characters between /ns and pass them on to the next part.) If anybody has a suggestion on just reading the damn file and calling a command based on the data off that line, let me know. And thanks for everybody for looking... I'll let you know if it works!