Hello All,

I'm new to the scripting world, and I am trying to do something that should I thought would be trivial but I seem to be running into some difficulty. Basically I have a Bash script which is prompting a user for a key. Sounds like a simple task, but if a user presses the enter key I would like to use a default value. Unfortunately I can not seem to distinguish between an enter key, a space, backspace, delete. Below is my code snippet, any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

------ Begin Code Snippet --------
echo "Would you like to do something? [Y]:
read -n 1 answer

if [ "$answer" == "y" ] || [ "$answer" == "Y" ]
then
echo "User would like to do something"

else
echo "User did NOT want to do something"
exit 1
fi

------ End Code Snippet --------

It seems that when ever a enter key(carriage return, space, backspace, delete...etc) my return value stored is a NULL character.

So basically I am just looking is someone knows of a way way to determining if a user pressed the Enter Key?

Try making it just "" instead of "y" if you want to just make it like a script where the user can change the value if needed but if not, just press enter to continue. Maybe that would work?

Or maybe this helps a little, this is from the setup.sh script in webmin. Just as an example

---------------------------------------------------------
printf "Login name (default admin): "
if [ "$login" = "" ]; then
read login
if [ "$login" = "" ]; then
login="admin"
fi
fi
---------------------------------------------------------
printf asks the user what they want the value to be. then it checks to see what was entered, reads if as login and then checks to see if the input was empty (pressed enter), if it was then it assigns the default value.

Here are two variants (my preference is the first one):
Option 1: Uses shell function:# Option 2: Uses simple loop