Question

I am writing a program that repeatedly does an operation till Ctrl+C is hit by the user in the Linux terminal. I am programming in C. Any ideas how i can implement this.

I have tested my program by using “for” loops with a condition but now i want to make it run as long as Ctrl+C is hit by the user and interrupted.

What I was thinking was of writing a do while loop like the following

do{
/Computation/
}
while(Ctrl+C is not hit)

But i dont know how to check for the Ctrl+C input from the user.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

A signal trap will do the trick more cleanly than spudd86’s suggestion. This example can be improved significantly, though.

#include <signal.h>
/* ... */

int execute;
void trap(int signal){ execute = 0; }

int main() {
    /* ... */
    signal(SIGINT, &trap);
    execute = 1;
    while(execute){
        /* ... */
    }
    signal(SIGINT, SIG_DFL);
    /* ... */
}