I find your solution was not very elegant in python. Unfortunately Im using mac and although I LOVE pygame, I cant seem to get it to work. Also Im using console and don’t want to be unix specific. So what I did is this:

from threading import Thread
program_run = True

class waitOnInput(Thread):
def run(self):
global program_run
thread_run = True
while thread_run :
data = raw_input(’input command (q for quit)->’)
print ‘got input : ‘, data
if data == ‘q’ :
thread_run = False
program_run = False

while program_run :
t = waitOnInput()
t.start()
#do stuff

t.join()

Your notes on Python non-blocking console input on Linux were extremely helpful.

The listed code seems to work fine in Solaris as well. Because the code is based on POSIX, it *should* be cross-platform capable. I haven’t tested it on Windows though.

Thank you,
Codifex

On Unix you can set your console from cooked to raw mode with the right stty invocation before running your stuff and then have the behaviour you need. On windows you just need a lib to configure your console correctly and you get single char input just fine. Most libs use line input on windows though, but thats just a matter of adding some flags when configuring the console.

See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686033(VS.85).aspx

Michael

For everyone else non-blocking IO is a piece of cake. Try checking out the man pages for fcntl, paying special attention to the O_NONBLOCK flag.