Properly get a single character.

[mleveill]

hush your mouth , C has it's place even today.

seconded

[oldneuro]

To get just a single character from stdin, there is no way in the standard C library.

To do it, you need to use the non-standard function "getch".  It is part of ncurses on Linux, and part of io.h on Windows.

#ifdef _WIN32
#include <io.h>
#else
#include <curses.h>
#endif

int main() {
  char c = '\0';
  printf("press 'q' to quit\n");
  while (c != 'q') {
    c = getch();
  }
  return 0;
}

This means that the program will have the added dependency of the ncurses library on Linux.

[myork]

To get just a single character from stdin, there is no way in the standard C library.

What about getc().

     #include <stdio.h>

     int     fgetc(FILE *stream);
     int     getc(FILE *stream);
     int     getc_unlocked(FILE *stream);

     int     getchar(void);
     int     getchar_unlocked(void);

     int     getw(FILE *stream);

[oldneuro]

getc (actually, fgetc(stdin)) only RETURNS a single character off the input stream, however, it does block until a newline or EOF is pressed.  In otherwords, getc() and fgetc(stdin) is exactly the same as getchar().

Hope that clears things up.  I encourage you to try out my suggestion for yourself to see what I mean.

[oldneuro]

// to compile, use the following:
// on win32: cl getc.c
// on gcc: gcc -o getc getc.c -lcurses

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#ifdef _WIN32
#include <conio.h>
#define printtxt        printf
#else
#include <curses.h>
#define printtxt        printw
#endif

int main()
{
        char c = '\0';

#ifndef _WIN32
        initscr();
        cbreak();
        noecho();
        nonl();
        intrflush(stdscr, FALSE);
        keypad(stdscr, TRUE);
#endif
        printtxt("press 'q' to quit\n");
        while (c != 'q')
                c = getch();
#ifndef _WIN32
        endwin();
#endif
        return 0;
}