endwin, and temporarily leaving curses mode

[Mike Mueller]

I'm working on a program which spends all its time in
curses/raw/noecho mode.  Recently I started working on a feature that
lets users drop out to a shell temporarily.  This seems to be a common
thing to do, and the answer in the docs is endwin() before the shell,
and refresh() after, as seen here:

http://www.roseindia.net/linux/tutorial/linux-howto/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/misc.html#TEMPLEAVE

However, I run endwin(), then invoke the shell (via system()) and the
result is somewhat correct, but not completely.  The shell displays a
normal prompt, but typed characters are not echoed back to the
terminal.  'ls' displays things in neat columns, so it seems like
we're in a semi-cooked mode.  Finally, when the user exits the shell,
I prompt "press enter to continue" and call fgets() to wait for that
'enter' before anything else happens.  Unfortunately, hitting enter
(or ^M) doesn't do anything at this prompt.  Hitting ^J, on the other
hand, does work.

When I call refresh(), curses is back to normal and my app is working
fine.  So the problem is only in the endwin-shell part of the process.

Any tips?

Thanks!
Mike