[Haskell-beginners] getChar and keyboard reading

[Matthias Güdemann]

Hi,

I wrote a program which should read the number of key presses in a
given time. It forks a thread which calls getChar and increases a MVar
each time getChar suceeds. After a delay (here 2s) the MVar is read,
its value is printed and the program exits.


import Control.Concurrent

increaseEveryPush mVCount = do
  _ <- getChar
  inh <- takeMVar mVCount
  putMVar mVCount (inh + 1)
  increaseEveryPush mVCount
  
main = do
  x <- newMVar 0
  forkIO (increaseEveryPush x)
  threadDelay 2000000
  inh <- takeMVar x
  putStr $ "\n" ++ (show inh) ++ " times button pushed\n"


But this does not work, as getChar does not succeed if there is no EOF
given (^D). It normally just exits with 0 as value in the MVar. Is
there a way toread the keyboard without having to terminate with EOF? 

regards,
Matthias