For Unix variants:There are several solutions. It's straightforward to do this using curses, but curses is a fairly large module to learn. Here's a solution without curses:

import termios, fcntl, sys, os
fd = sys.stdin.fileno()

oldterm = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
newattr = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
newattr[3] = newattr[3] & ~termios.ICANON & ~termios.ECHO
termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSANOW, newattr)

oldflags = fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_GETFL)
fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags | os.O_NONBLOCK)

try:
    while 1:
        try:
            c = sys.stdin.read(1)
            print "Got character", `c`
        except IOError: pass
finally:
    termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSAFLUSH, oldterm)
    fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, oldflags)

You need the termios and the fcntl module for any of this to work, and I've only tried it on Linux, though it should work elsewhere. In this code, characters are read and printed one at a time.

termios.tcsetattr() turns off stdin's echoing and disables canonical mode. fcntl.fnctl() is used to obtain stdin's file descriptor flags and modify them for non-blocking mode. Since reading stdin when it is empty results in an IOError, this error is caught and ignored.

CATEGORY: library