How do *nix pseudo-terminals work ? What's the master/slave channel?

I want to write a simple, dumb, X terminal emulator in C on a Linux system.

At first, I just thought I would have to popen a shell and display its output. I checked xterm and rxvt code, and it looks a bit more complicated.

First, I have to open a pseudo-terminal with openpty. So I look at the man page and see that openpty fills 2 file descriptors, the master and the slave. Both xterm and rxvt code are messy because of the system-dependent-ness of those specials files.

I understand the termios stuff : it's just a bunch of information about the escape code of the terminal. What I really don't get is : what am I suppose to do with the master/slave file descriptor ?

An example program which open a terminal, logs in, executes a "ls" on the shell would be awesome.

(English is not my native language, excuse my eventual mistake)

Edit: Here's the sample code I came up with :

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <pty.h>
#include <utmp.h>
#include <ctype.h>

void
safe_print (char* s)
{
    while(*s) { 
        if(*s == '\n')
            putchar("\n");
        else if(iscntrl(*s))
            printf("\\e(%d)", *s);
        else
            putchar(*s);
        s++;
    }
}


int
main (int argc, char** argv)
{
    char buf[BUFSIZ] = {0};
    int master;
    int ret = forkpty(&master, NULL, NULL, NULL);

    if(ret == -1)
        puts("no fork"), exit(0);

    if(!ret) { 
        execl("/bin/sh", "sh", NULL);
        exit(0);
    }

    sleep(1); /* let the shell run */


    if(argc >= 2) {
        write(master, argv[1], strlen(argv[1]));
        write(master, "\n", 1);
    } else {
        write(master, "date\n", sizeof "date\n");
    }


    while(1) {
        switch(ret = read(master, buf, BUFSIZ)) {
        case -1:
            puts("error!"); 
            exit(1);
            break;
        case 0: