Getting input one character at a time doesn't involve using
select and non-blocking I/O (at least not the easiest way).
The way that the input is processed is set by the user's
terminal. The default setting is known as 'canonical mode',
which processes line-by-line. I also must correct my
original statement, for there is indeed a way with the
standard perl modules to do what you want. For example:
use POSIX qw(:termios_h);
my $termios = new POSIX::Termios;
$termios->setlflag(~ICANON); # Turn off canonical mode
$termios->setcc(VMIN, 1); # Read a min of 1 character
$termios->setcc(VTIME, 0); # No time-out on reads
$termios->setattr(0, TCSANOW); # Apply settings to STDIN
while(read(STDIN, $key, 1)) {
print "Got: $key\r\n";
}
or something similar will work. The flags and function
calls used by the POSIX::Termios module are nearly identical
to the corresponding ones in C.