Check if stdin is empty

c, c++, stdin

Solution

You might want to try select() function, and wait for having data into the input stream.

Description:

select() and pselect() allow a program to monitor multiple file descriptors, waiting until one or more of the file descriptors become "ready" for some class of I/O operation (e.g., input possible). A file descriptor is considered ready if it is possible to perform the corresponding I/O operation (e.g., read(2)) without blocking.

In your case, the file descriptor will be `stdin`

void yourFunction(){
    fd_set fds;
    struct timeval timeout;
    int selectRetVal;

    /* Set time limit you want to WAIT for the fdescriptor to have data, 
       or not( you can set it to ZERO if you want) */
    timeout.tv_sec = 0;
    timeout.tv_usec = 1;

    /* Create a descriptor set containing our remote socket
       (the one that connects with the remote troll at the client side).  */
    FD_ZERO(&fds);
    FD_SET(stdin, &fds);

    selectRetVal = select(sizeof(fds)*8, &fds, NULL, NULL, &timeout);

    if (selectRetVal == -1) {
        /* error occurred in select(),  */
        printf("select failed()\n");
    } else if (selectRetVal == 0) {
        printf("Timeout occurred!!! No data to fetch().\n");
        //do some other stuff
    } else {
        /* The descriptor has data, fetch it. */
        if (FD_ISSET(stdin, &fds)) {
            //do whatever you want with the data
        }
    }
}

Hope it helps.

Problem

I searched but did not get a relevant answer to this question, i am working on a linux machine, i wanted to check if the standard input stream contains any character, without removing the characters from the stream.

Original source