Diff for "BashFAQ/065"

Differences between revisions 1 and 2

Is there a "PAUSE" command in bash like there is in MSDOS batch scripts? To prompt the user to press any key to continue?

Use the following to wait until the user presses enter:

read -sp "Press [enter] to continue..."

Or use the following to wait until the user presses any key to continue:

read -sn 1 -p "Press any key to continue..."

If you want to put a timeout on that, use the -t option to read:

echo "WARNING: You are about to do something stupid."
if ! read -sn 1 -t 5 -p "Will resume in 5 seconds.  Press any key to abort..."
then something_stupid
fi

For those of you who just want to pause for a while, regardless of the user's input, use sleep:

echo "The script is tired.  Please wait a minute."
sleep 60

-  ⇤ ← Revision 1 as of 2007-05-02 23:59:39 → 
  Size: 323
  Editor: redondos
  Comment:
+   ← Revision 2 as of 2008-04-30 10:12:50 → ⇥
  Size: 808
  Editor: Lhunath
  Comment: Improved examples and some more explanation.
-Deletions are marked like this.
+Additions are marked like this.
 Line 4:
-No, but you can use these:
+Use the following to wait until the user presses enter:
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-echo press enter to continue; read
+read -sp "Press [enter] to continue..."
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+Or use the following to wait until the user presses any key to continue:
-Line 9:
+Line 11:
-echo press any key to continue; read -n 1
+read -sn 1 -p "Press any key to continue..."
-Line 11:
+Line 13:
+If you want to put a timeout on that, use the `-t` option to `read`:
-Line 12:
+Line 16:
-read -p 'press enter to continue'
+echo "WARNING: You are about to do something stupid."
if ! read -sn 1 -t 5 -p "Will resume in 5 seconds.  Press any key to abort..."
then something_stupid
fi
-Line 14:
+Line 21:
+For those of you who just want to pause for a while, regardless of the user's input, use `sleep`:
{{{
echo "The script is tired.  Please wait a minute."
sleep 60
}}}