c - Non-blocking stdio

Question

I'm working on a program which will be taking in user input from the console as well as printfing out in a separate thread. I want to avoid situations where the user is halfway through typing something in and a printf comes along and prints itself at the cursor.

Is there a way to do non-blocking io in c from the console window? Ideally, capturing keypresses or something like that such that what the user types doesn't appear on the screen. I'm developing in Ubuntu, and it's best if I don't have to use things like ncurses.

Answer 1

using termios you can disable terminal echoing:

#include <termios.h>

struct termios oflags, nflags;
tcgetattr(fileno(stdin), &oflags);
nflags = oflags;
nflags.c_lflag &= ~ECHO;
nflags.c_lflag |= ECHONL;

if (tcsetattr(fileno(stdin), TCSANOW, &nflags) != 0) {
    /* handle error */
}

then before exit (use atexit) you must restore the terminal:

if (tcsetattr(fileno(stdin), TCSANOW, &oflags) != 0) {
    /* handle error */
}