How to make a script like "press any key within 10 seconds"?

[Fragon]

I want to make a script, it will wait user's input, if exceed 10 seconds and user input nothing , the script will go-on with a default value!
How to do?
Thanks a lot and very sorry for my poor English!

[John Poff · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Take a look at the 'line' command. You can use the -t option to specify a timeout value in seconds. Here is a snippet from the man page:

The following lines in a shell script prompt for a file name and display information about the file:

echo 'Enter file name: \c'
reply=`line`
ls -l $reply

To limit the response time to 10 seconds, use the form:

reply=`line -t 10`

then test for no response. If no response occurs before timeout expires, a default behavior should be provided.



So all you would need to do is add an 'if' statement to test the variable and set a default value if it doesn't have a value.

JP

[Mark Ellzey]

Hi,

Keep in mind that this 'line' command only works with sh and ksh. It will not work with csh.

Regards,
Mark

[Ron Kuris]

It works fine with csh also, as far as I can tell (of course, you have to use slightly different syntax):

#!/bin/csh
set line=`line -t 2`
echo $line