Where is the <conio.h> header file on Linux? Why can't I find <conio.h>?

conio.h is a C header file used in old MS-DOS compilers to create text user interfaces. Compilers that targeted non-DOS operating systems, such as Linux, Win32 and OS/2, provided different implementations of these functions.

The #include <curses.h> will give you almost all the functionalities that was provided in conio.h

nucurses need to be installed at the first place

In deb based Distros use

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

And in rpm based distros use

sudo yum install ncurses-devel ncurses

For getch() class of functions, you can try this


The original conio.h was implemented by Borland, so its not a part of the C Standard Library nor is defined by POSIX.

But here is an implementation for Linux that uses ncurses to do the job.


A popular Linux library which has similar functionality would be ncurses.