Question

I’m having some problems getting ncurses’ getch() to block. Default operation seems to be non-blocking (or have I missed some initialization)? I would like it to work like getch() in Windows. I have tried various versions of

timeout(3000000);
nocbreak();
cbreak();
noraw();
etc...

(not all at the same time). I would prefer to not (explicitly) use any WINDOW, if possible. A while loop around getch(), checking for a specific return value is OK too.

Answer 1

The curses library is a package deal. You can’t just pull out one routine and hope for the best without properly initializing the library. Here’s a code that correctly blocks on getch():

#include <curses.h>

int main(void) {
  initscr();
  timeout(-1);
  int c = getch();
  endwin();
  printf ("%d %c\n", c, c);
  return 0;
}