Trying to write a BASH script which allows input of paragraphs

ChrisScott · 11-26-2006, 04:04 PM

Hi all.

I've written a BASH script which generates a Latex document. Most of the info is generated by the program however I need to include a user input which is not ended by hitting return.

At the moment I'm just using the 'read' command, but obviously to seperate paragraphs the user has to press enter - which finishes the input.

Is there another way to take inputs or can you get read to ignore the enter key - if so how can the user tell the program that the input is finished?

I'm a bit confused any help or ideas would be apreciated.

Thanks Chris

ChrisScott · 11-26-2006, 04:26 PM

I've had an idea, I used a loop as so:

while [ input != "end" ] ; do

read input
echo "$input" >> inputf

done

cat inputf

However, when I ran this 'end' didn't finish the input and I was stuck in an infinite loop!

cs-cam · 11-26-2006, 04:31 PM

Hmm, there is probably a trick somewhere and I'm going about it the long way but a temporary solution would be to use cat.

Code:

cat > /tmp/tmpfile.txt
PARAGRAPH=$(cat /tmp/tmpfile.txt)

ChrisScott · 11-26-2006, 04:46 PM

Yeah I think that will be perfectly suitable, it's not that long. Thanks. If you come across the trick let me know.

matthewg42 · 11-26-2006, 05:11 PM

I think this will demonstrate what you want. The cat line is the important one - the others are just fluff for the demo.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
tmp=$(mktemp)
echo "OK, enter some text.  Control-D to end"
cat > $tmp
echo ""
echo "OK, here's what you entered"
cat $tmp
rm -f $tmp

ChrisScott · 11-26-2006, 05:25 PM

sorry, but that didn't quite work:

It did on the command prompt but after I replied to your last post I put the command into my shell script which completely ignored it - no error - no prompt - nothing. Don't know if I did something stupid? I used,

cat > /tmp/example.txt

I posted this just after matthew - so haven't read his yet! maybe you can ignore this one!

ChrisScott · 11-26-2006, 05:32 PM

Yeah thanks Matthew that works great.