How can I prevent scanf() to wait forever for an input character?

Question

I want to fulfill the following things in a console application:

1. If user inputs a character, the application will do the corresponding task. For example, if us

Answer 1

Here is a working example of how to do this with poll (probably the most 'correct' way on Linux):

#include 
#include 
#include 

int main()
{
    struct pollfd mypoll = { STDIN_FILENO, POLLIN|POLLPRI };
    char string[10];

    if( poll(&mypoll, 1, 2000) )
    {
        scanf("%9s", string);
        printf("Read string - %s\n", string);
    }
    else
    {
        puts("Read nothing");
    }

    return 0;
}

The timeout is the third argument to poll and is in milliseconds - this example will wait for 2 seconds for input on stdin. Windows has WSAPoll, which should work similarly.