Hi all,

I am a university student doing a project on uClinux Coldfire boards. I am faced with a daunting yet simple problem which I can't get my head around.

Is there any way for me to check for user input when inside a while loop? If the user hasn't inputed anything then the while loop just continues. Basically I want the user to be able to terminate the while loop.

At the moment scanf and other similar functions that I know wait for user input. There is no timeout.

Does anyone know of a better alternative than this. I can't really fork out a new process because of uClinux only supports vfork.

Regards

--
Bolt

You could try using non-blocking I/O (though the C standard library doesn't support this, of course).

Alex

... i've never used c in practice, so i may be wrong, but maybe you could test stdin against true or false and so decide if there was any input. on second taught, there really must be an option to read (a byte) directly from stdin, and it should be zero if no input.
but... ...you never know

Hi!
Can you please post a fragment of code where you have problems (if it is not so conspirative)?

...i maybe answered wrong, but i think i understood what he ment:

while(some_condition){

printf("Hello world!\n");
printf("Hit any key to stop printing \"Hello World!\"!\n");

input= // how to determine that a key was pressed?

if(input){
exit();
} else{
// do nothing, means, continue the "while" loop
} // end if
} // end while

Use select() for this. Add STDIN in the read list of select and set the timer value to 0. This way when the the application will come to select(), it will simply check if the there in some input. If there is not input if will immidiately go forward.

Yaser

Yes, select() is what you're looking for.
It is a bit of a tricky function to use, though.
So, apart from "man select" itself, you may want to read "man select_tut".