How to handle key pressed in a Linux console in C?

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The line discipline for a terminal device often works in canonical mode by default. In this mode, the terminal driver doesn’t present the buffer to userspace until the newline is seen (Enter key is pressed).

You can set the terminal into raw (non-canonical) mode by using tcsetattr() to manipulate the termios structure. Clearing the ECHO and ICANON flags respectively disables echoing of characters as they are typed and causes read requests to be satisfied directly from the input queue. Setting the values of VTIME and VMIN to zero in the c_cc array causes the read request (fgetc()) to return immediately rather than block; effectively polling stdin. The call to fgetc() will return EOF if a character is not available in the stream.

#define _XOPEN_SOURCE 700
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <termios.h>
#include <time.h>

int getkey() {
    int character;
    struct termios orig_term_attr;
    struct termios new_term_attr;

    /* set the terminal to raw mode */
    tcgetattr(fileno(stdin), &orig_term_attr);
    memcpy(&new_term_attr, &orig_term_attr, sizeof(struct termios));
    new_term_attr.c_lflag &= ~(ECHO|ICANON);
    new_term_attr.c_cc[VTIME] = 0;
    new_term_attr.c_cc[VMIN] = 0;
    tcsetattr(fileno(stdin), TCSANOW, &new_term_attr);

    /* read a character from the stdin stream without blocking */
    /*   returns EOF (-1) if no character is available */
    character = fgetc(stdin);

    /* restore the original terminal attributes */
    tcsetattr(fileno(stdin), TCSANOW, &orig_term_attr);

    return character;
}

int main()
{
    int key;

    /* initialize the random number generator */
    srand(time(NULL));

    for (;;) {
        key = getkey();
        /* terminate loop on ESC (0x1B) or Ctrl-D (0x04) on STDIN */
        if (key == 0x1B || key == 0x04) {
            break;
        }
        else {
            /* print random ASCII character between 0x20 - 0x7F */
            key = (rand() % 0x7F);
            printf("%c", ((key < 0x20) ? (key + 0x20) : key));
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

Note: This code omits error checking for simplicity.

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