Looking for a simple linux arduino listener

Hello everyone,
I get the impression I must not be the first to ask this, but my google skills apparently can't find the right things to type to get what I need. All the examples I find are either complete gibberish or plain don't work. I feel like a complete nooby.

For a home project I'm working on, I need to have a relatively simple "listener" process that just sits there and waits for the arduino to say something. When it does, it gathers the chatter until it gets a linefeed. Once that happens, it takes that input and forks an external process with said chatter as a parameter and goes back to listening.

My preference would be for something in C, as I already know it. I've done a simple one in BASH, but I had to resort to some rather weird hacks to get it to work at least half fight, plus it keeps hanging for no reason.

Python/PySerial (Arduino Playground - Python) ?

Here you go
I'm currently working on the same thing.

http://todbot.com/blog/2006/12/06/arduino-serial-c-code-to-talk-to-arduino/

http://dce.felk.cvut.cz/pos/cv5/doc/serial.html

By the way I'm getting a bit distorted readouts with this code, would you mail me if you figure out how to fix that?