read from keyboard non blocking

hey there

is there a way to read from keyboard without breaking a program in C.

meaning if I use getchar the prog waits for new input from the keyboard but I want the program to be executed until it gets a stop character. I know I can use multi threading but is there s tutorial on something simpler?

I can't think of any solution, really, except your suggestion of using threads. If this was embedded programming, I'd simply keep polling the pin the button was connected to, but I don't know if it's even possible to poll the keyboard on a PC. At a guess, I'd say that would be OS specific. It sure isn't anywhere in the C standard, but I'm reasonably sure a solution could be found somewhere in POSIX, not that I'd know where to look.