Nowadays there's very few programs written specifically for the console. As has been said above, they come from the days of MS-DOS where you needed a way for getting direct keyboard char (for eg moving the cursor etc) where you couldn't have to wait for a to be entered. These two functions will read a char from the keyboard (without/with echo) if one is available without waiting for a to be entered. It's main usage is to test if a char is available (_kbhit() ) for reading with _getch()/_getche(). Also for Linux there is įor Windows, conio.h is part of the Windows SDK so is available for all Windows compilers - not just VS. If you're using Windows then these can be provided using the Windows Console functions (and similar for Linux).

I am still using the conio.h, and I guess it is considered a third - what os are you using? conio.h provides console direct input/output functions (not stream buffered) without using any file streams etc. I don't think there is a kbhit() function but you can accomplish the same thing using other functions. It should be possible to write code that is compatible with both ncurses and pdcurses.

On Linux and other unix-like systems it's common to use ncurses. There are 'curses' libraries that you can use.

Is there a standard library that provide the same functions as: But now I don't think it's going to happen. Nowadays more and more things get standardized, they even tried to put graphics into the standard library at one point, so if console applications had still been the norm I wouldn't have been too surprised if they had actually standardized something like this. Historically the standard library has been relatively small and a lot of the functionality has been left to system libraries or third-party libraries to provide. I believe something similar should work on Windows too. I would not see any output or get the chance to input anything. Then the input would get read from the 'input' file and the output '48' would get stored in a file named 'output'.

Get the conio library