How do you do non-blocking console I/O on Linux in C?

How do you do nonblocking console IO on Linux/OS X in C?

I want to add an example:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char const *argv[])

{
    char buf[20];
    fcntl(0, F_SETFL, fcntl(0, F_GETFL) | O_NONBLOCK);
    sleep(4);
    int numRead = read(0, buf, 4);
    if (numRead > 0) {
        printf("You said: %s", buf);
    }
}

When you run this program you have 4 seconds to provide input to standard in. If no input found, it will not block and will simply return.

2 sample executions:

Korays-MacBook-Pro:~ koraytugay$ ./a.out
fda 
You said: fda
Korays-MacBook-Pro:~ koraytugay$ ./a.out
Korays-MacBook-Pro:~ koraytugay$

Like Pete Kirkham, I found cc.byexamples.com, and it worked for me. Go there for a good explanation of the problem, as well as the ncurses version.

My code needed to take an initial command from standard input or a file, then watch for a cancel command while the initial command was processed. My code is C++, but you should be able to use scanf() and the rest where I use the C++ input function getline().

The meat is a function that checks if there is any input available:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/select.h>

// cc.byexamples.com calls this int kbhit(), to mirror the Windows console
//  function of the same name.  Otherwise, the code is the same.
bool inputAvailable()  
{
  struct timeval tv;
  fd_set fds;
  tv.tv_sec = 0;
  tv.tv_usec = 0;
  FD_ZERO(&fds);
  FD_SET(STDIN_FILENO, &fds);
  select(STDIN_FILENO+1, &fds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
  return (FD_ISSET(0, &fds));
}

This has to be called before any stdin input function When I used std::cin before using this function, it never returned true again. For example, main() has a loop that looks like this:

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{ 
   std::string initialCommand;
   if (argc > 1) {
      // Code to get the initial command from a file
   } else {
     while (!inputAvailable()) {
       std::cout << "Waiting for input (Ctrl-C to cancel)..." << std::endl;
       sleep(1);
     }
     std::getline(std::cin, initialCommand);
   }

   // Start a thread class instance 'jobThread' to run the command
   // Start a thread class instance 'inputThread' to look for further commands
   return 0;
}

In the input thread, new commands were added to a queue, which was periodically processed by the jobThread. The inputThread looked a little like this:

THREAD_RETURN inputThread()
{
  while( !cancelled() ) {
    if (inputAvailable()) {
      std::string nextCommand;
      getline(std::cin, nextCommand);
      commandQueue.lock();
      commandQueue.add(nextCommand);
      commandQueue.unlock();
    } else {
        sleep(1);
    }
  }
  return 0;
}

This function probably could have been in main(), but I'm working with an existing codebase, not against it.

For my system, there was no input available until a newline was sent, which was just what I wanted. If you want to read every character when typed, you need to turn off "canonical mode" on stdin. cc.byexamples.com has some suggestions which I haven't tried, but the rest worked, so it should work.

How do you do non-blocking console I/O on Linux in C?

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