How can I read keyboard without stopping

[The Beach Bum]

In article <1267 at ficc.UUCP> peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I believe that once upon a time on some system a stat() on a pipe would
>return the number of characters in a pipe. Wouldn't it make sense to
>have stat() on a terminal device return the number of characters available?
>(and a stat() on /dev/mem return memory size, and...)

stat() is implemented by taking chunks of the inode table enty and stuffing
that into a "struct stat" thingy.  i believe the number of characters
queued in a pipe was a side effect (read `feature') of the implementation
of pipes, and probably not intentional.

one must remember that under system v, pipes are really just unnamed
files which never grow past a certain size, and who blocks get
juggled as they are written.
-- 
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