Receiving key press and key release events in Linux terminal applications?

Question

I would like to write a simple C program that will perform different actions based on both \"key down\" and \"key up\" events. This program will be run from inside rxvt.

Answer 1

This won't work in the general case. ANSI terminals (from which all emulators descend) represent key "press" events only. They don't record down/up events independently.

If you need low level keyboard event access, the proper environment is really a GUI program. Even a web application will have cleaner access to key events than a terminal.