i was wandering how to write a program, that would do something (loop around) UNTIL some key is pressed, and if it is pressed, it will do something else.

for example if i wanted to write a countdown timer in C and i wish to have a 'pause' function, but i dont know how to make it to write out the time every couple of ms's and at the same time, if i press a key, to pause the timer
the functions like getchar, scanf etc wait for the user to press the key.. so the coundown timer isnt working at that time

i want something that would do this:


do something
if(key was pressed)
--do sth. else
else
do something again

This seems to come up a lot, lately. Your question can be rephrased as 'how do I do non-blocking character-at-a-time terminal IO?'. The answer is found in http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...07#post2570807

--- rod.

regarding the 'two things at once', you can use multiprocessing and signals. try to find a basic tutorial on it. the system calls would be 'kill', 'signal', and 'fork'.

if this problem isnt an urgent one, i can write an example wednesday or so.. studying for my exam tomorrow!

hope it helps.