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From: jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: reading from terminal
Message-ID: <7749@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 8-Jun-87 13:14:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.7749
Posted: Mon Jun  8 13:14:07 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Jun-87 04:48:31 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 29


  This may be a trivial question to the wizards but  I am a unix
novice (~3 months).  I need to read a character from the terminal
without stopping a program.  I have a program thats going to
do a lot of interesting things you wouldn't be interested in.
I want to give the user the ability to halt the processing
at any time - poke around the program and then resume processing.
While the program is doing its thing all sorts of terminal and
file i/o are happening. I have done this successfully and simply
on VMS using qio with the proper flag but I am having problems
doing it on Unix. I would rather not have to do this trick by
using a second process nor would I want to usurp Control-C.

  I should qualify the "anytime" above. The program will be
(basically) a while loop. I would like to be able to check
at the top of the loop to see if the user has entered the 
proper character - if he/she has then go into the special
snooping mode, if no character or the wrong character is entered
then ignore and continue with processing.

  I really must say that Unix documentation compared to
VMS doesn't measure up( or maybe I am looking in the wrong
places if so enlighten me) 

                                   Thirster after knowledge

Jerry Freedman, Jr       "If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards"
jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa
(617)271-6248 or 8658