How can I find out if there are characters available for reading (and if so, how many)? Alternatively, how can I do a read that will not block if there are no characters available?
These, too, are entirely operating-system-specific. Some versions of curses have a nodelay function. Depending on your system, you may also be able to use ``nonblocking I/O'', or a system call named select or poll, or the FIONREAD ioctl, c_cc[VTIME], or kbhit, or rdchk, or the O_NDELAY option to open or fcntl. See also question 19.1.
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This page by Steve Summit // Copyright 1995 // mail feedback