C Full Screen Interactive Application

[Kris November]

Hey gang,

So I am working on honing my C skills in FreeBSD. My main issue is that I have a use case to look for input on an open socket, while still seeming "interactive" to the user.

My first thought was to mimic something like a text editor, that can accept input while simultaneously performing other tasks and populating the screen accordingly.

Right now, my application runs in series so the only way I can get an updated response from the server, is by sending a message out.

while(1){
    //Look for input from user scanf()
    //Echo response from open socket to stdout
}

My gut is telling me multithreading, but that seems messy. I know I have seen this type of application in FreeBSD for years. So I would imagine there are probably some good libraries, or working examples?

Can anyone suggest a good FreeBSD lib or port that might be helpful?

I really would like to use an existing lib (if one is available) for FreeBSD.

 

[tobik@]

Can anyone suggest a good FreeBSD lib or port that might be helpful?

devel/libuv or devel/libevent2

 

[kpedersen]

By default receiving from a socket blocks until data comes along so you should look into polling that socket using select(2) to see if there is data (so it won't block) before calling the recv(2) on it.

The example on this page might be useful:
http://developerweb.net/viewtopic.php?id=2933

 

[fnoyanisi]

My gut is telling me multithreading, but that seems messy.

I am no software developer, but I think multi-threading is fun and if your goal is to "learn" I would suggest you to get your hands into POSIX threads.

PS : You mentioned C, but as a side note clang++ sipped with FreeBSD Release 10-1 supports C++11 threads.

 

[Juha Nurmela]

Have a peek at kqueue(2) too. Wonderful system, not portable though.