How do I listen to STDIN input without pausing my script?

I have a while loop consistently listening to incoming connections and outputting them to console. I would like to be able to issue commands via the console without affecting the output. I've tried:

Thread.new do
    while true
        input   = gets.chomp
        puts "So I herd u sed, \"#{input}\"."
        #Commands would be in this scope
    end
end

However, that seems to pause my entire script until inp开发者_开发技巧ut is received; and even then, some threads I have initiated before this one don't seem to execute. I've tried looking at TCPSocket's select() method to no avail.

Not sure where are the commands you want to "continue running" in your example. Try this small script:

Thread.new do
  loop do
    s = gets.chomp
    puts "You entered #{s}"
    exit if s == 'end'
  end
end

i = 0
loop do
  puts "And the script is still running (#{i})..."
  i += 1
  sleep 1
end

Reading from STDIN is done in a separate thread, while the main script continues to work.

Ruby uses green threads, so blocking system calls will block all threads anyway. An idea:

require 'io/wait'

while true
  if $stdin.ready?
    line = $stdin.readline.strip
    p "line from stdin: #{line}"
  end
  p "really, I am working here"
  sleep 0.1
end