Peter Berg wrote:

> how can I test whether a key was pressed or not without such wainting
> functions like getc() ?

Peter, 

Thinking back to my X.500 days and writing curses interfaces, the best
thing that I can suggest is to get the socket descriptor of the keyboard
and do a select() on it (with a very small finite time out). 
Alternativly, if all goes well and I get around to mailing Neil my fixes
this week, wait for libpthreads.a/libpthreads.so and use async IO with a
poll() call.

Paul