Shell Programming and Scripting

Would there be any reason for why a 'read ans' would not wait for a user's response (i.e user has to hit a key to continue)? I know for sure that it is doing everything else in that part of my 'if' statement but it doesn't wait for me to hit a key before continuing.

The strange thing is that for ans1 - ans3, it waits, then beginning with ans4 - ans7, it just continues as if I had hit a key and I've put breakpoints in but can't figure it out.

I'm not sure what would cause this anomaly. I've written many interactive scripts (ksh) with over 5-10 prompts in them and they've always worked fine.

I just can't figure out what could cause this one to be so different that it would ignore the wait prompt (read ans4). The code is identical to how I got ans1 - ans3 so I'm just wondering if any of you know/heard of this...this script has lots of validation going on using regexp, grep, etc to validate fields in a file but this should not be causing my problem....

Is it possible for you to post your script?? It does sound weird.

It's impossible to say what is happening without looking at the script. But you have probably redirected stdin at the time that the "read" statement is executed. Try something like:

read ians4 < /dev/tty

Thanks! That did it. All is working now. So is this the most definite way to ensure that the user is prompted?

As soon as I added the < /dev/tty, all my prompts worked as they should at specified points.

Is it good practice then to always do this for every read statement in an interactive script?
Would there be a reason why one should not use the redirection every time?

Gianni

The " < /dev/tty" opens the file called /dev/tty and attaches it to stdin. That is an expensive operation. You don't want to do that needlessly.