Journey's End

Preserving stdin when using SDL

SDL has a "feature" where by it redirects stdin/out/err on certain platforms, including OS X. This presented problems since tcprose (an opengl network visualiser) depended on stdin for interprocess communication. After much mucking about, I arrived eventually at a 3 line solution to the problem:

First we duplicate the stdin file descriptor so when SDL calls close() on 0 the stream remains open.

int dup_fd = dup(0);

Then we initalise SDL, and let it redirect stdin as it does.

SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);

Here is where we do our little trick: close 0, then duplicating the original stdin stream back onto 0, so scanf etc will continue to work.

close(0);
dup2(dup_fd,0);

And viola! We have stdin back again, no longer redirected. This solution won't work for window users though. See discussion at gmane.org.
Cheers,
Steve