I have a GUI program which should also be controllable via CLI (for monitoring). The CLI is implemented in a while loop using raw_input. If I quit the program via a GUI close button, it hangs in raw_input and does not quit until it gets an input. How can I immediately abort raw_input without entering an input? I run it on WinXP but I want it to be platform independent, it should also work within Eclipse since it is a developer tool. Python version is 2.6. I searched stackoverflow for hours and I know there are many answers to that topic, but is there really no platform independent solution to have a non-blocking CLI reader? If not, what would be the best way to overcome this problem? Thanks