How do I pause C command-line program?

Question

Hello. I'm writing a little command-line game app in C and I'm curious about how I can pause the program to wait for the user to hit return. I want the user to need to hit return (or having to hit any key would work too) to make the program continue, and I would like the key that was hit not to appear on the screen -- just a simple sort of "hit any key to continue" type thing. In C++ I think we used something like system("Pause") or something like that -- don't really remember, but any help here will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Something like this will print a prompt, then wait for a keystroke:
printf("Hit any key to continue> ");
getchar();
However in a console application, it's not so easy to prevent the user's keystrokes from being echoed. There are ways to turn the echo off for the keystroke then restore it, but those can depend on the environment. I'd need to know whether you're running your program in an Xcode console window, a Terminal window, or elsewhere. In short, don't go there unless it's quite important to you. The above prompt will show any chars that are keyed-in as text after the arrow, which is what a user would expect.
Hope that helps!
- Ray