reading the keyboard

is there a way to read if the keyboard is being pressed and if so which key is being pressed without halting untill a key is pressed? sort of like getch() but without stopping the program untill a key is pressed. im working under borland 5 in a dos environment

you could call a function that checks for input for a set period then passes back to program control if it recieves nothing in that time

Huh, in MFC it is the WM_CHAR message... but in DOS- I have no idea...

probably kbhit()...?