From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2006-06-07T13:36:17+09:00
Subject: Re: pausing until a character is received

Sy Ali wrote:
> I'm struggling to figure out how to pause my script and await a single
> character.  I've been using gets which works to pause but I'd like to
> do it more cleanly.
>
> My best lead has been in this ruby quiz[1], and the reference to
> STDIN.getc .. however, having fumbled from a few angles, I'm still not
> able to get it working the way I want.

From the quiz summary:

begin
  require "Win32API"
  def read_char
    Win32API.new("crtdll", "_getch", [], "L").Call
  end
rescue LoadError
  def read_char
    system "stty raw -echo"
    STDIN.getc
  ensure
    system "stty -raw echo"
  end
end

> I'd like to pause until any character is received, and be able to
> gracefully rescue from an Interrupt.

To handle the interrupt signal, or SIGINT (but do nothing):

trap(:INT) {}

> The best I can do is pause on any character but ignore the interrupt.
> So ^c would act like any other character.. which isn't what I want.

I don't understand your last paragraph. Is the code I posted what you
were after?

Cheers,
Dave