Checking the stdin buffer if it's empty
There are several soutions:
poll or select with timeout of 0 - these would return immediately and result is either -1 with errno EAGAIN
if no data available or number of descriptors with data (one, since you're checking only stdin).
ioctl is a swiss army knife of using descriptors. The request you need is I_NREAD
:
if (ioctl(0, I_NREAD, &n) == 0 && n > 0)
// we have exactly n bytes to read
However the correct solution is to read everything you got (using scanf
) as a line, then process the result - and this works good enough with sscanf
:
char buf[80]; // large enough
scanf("%79s", buf); // read everything we have in stdin
if (sscanf(buf, "%d", &number) == 1)
// we have a number
... as long as you properly handle re-reading, strings that are longer than your buffer, and other real-life complications.
For anyone who comes here from google – easy select
solution to check stdin
emptyness:
fd_set readfds;
FD_ZERO(&readfds);
FD_SET(STDIN_FILENO, &readfds);
fd_set savefds = readfds;
struct timeval timeout;
timeout.tv_sec = 0;
timeout.tv_usec = 0;
int chr;
int sel_rv = select(1, &readfds, NULL, NULL, &timeout);
if (sel_rv > 0) {
puts("Input:");
while ((chr = getchar()) != EOF) putchar(chr);
} else if (sel_rv == -1) {
perror("select failed");
}
readfds = savefds;
Needs unistd.h
, stdlib.h
and stdio.h
.
Explanation can be found here.
UPD: Thanks DrBeco for noticing that select returns -1 on error -- error handling was added.
Actually, select returns:
- the number of ready descriptors that are contained in the descriptor sets
- 0 if the time limit expires
- -1 if an error occurred (errno would be set)