PROGRESS BAR with shell script
 

Hi all,

The scenario is

A UNIX SHELL SCRIPT WHILE INSTALLING AN APPLICATION SHOULD DISPLAY A PROGRESS BAR OF HOW MUCH THE THE INSTALLATION IS COMPLETED AS IN WINDOWS ........ (in terms of time) ANY IDEAs????

what are all the factors that i need to consider ?

Thanks for the understanding,
Murugesan

what kind of installation is it? Some sort of package based, etc?

Yeah it is package based and the user has options to select the packages.

Regards,
Murugesan

Installing an application with a shell script is kinda broad... What exactly do you mean?

Are we talking rpm's, deb's or compiling from source?

rpm: does it already with 'rpm -ivh mypack.rpm'

deb: impossible as for as i know (there's is a small amount available throught '--status-fd <filedescriptor number>')

compiling: very very hard!

If you're thinking in different lines please specify a bit more...

Cheers

>> compiling:
Yeah this is !!

It is impossible to base the progress bar on the needed time (since a source file of 2x the size doesn't necessarily need 2x the time to compile), but you can base it on the number of source files already compiled. Just compile a certain file and advance the bar by one.

However, _do not_ do this! Unix users want to have a standardized process when building and installing a software package (i.e. doing a 'configure; make; make install'), it's more important than knowing when it will have finished (it will have finished, when it will have finished :), a progress bar doesn't make it faster). A real Unix user wouldn't even see the progress bar since they do something else in this time.
This is probably one of the main differences between Windows and Unix users: Windows users want a colored surface with everything moving every second, while Unix users want standardized and working programs.