Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Experts,

I have written a php script that calls several smaller bash shell scripts throughout it's loop process. Users run this script to achieve a task that this script has automated. However this script depending upon the amount of input variables could take some time to run. It may be a short amount of time. Or long amount.

Is it possible to add some kind of processing indicator to my script to show the amount or percentage that has completed. So the end user can judge completion time?

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi.

IMO: Using simple PHP and shell, it's not possible. This is because the output from your shell script is returned, after the script is finished, to the web server and processed before it's sent to the browser. (the output of your shell script is returned to PHP, which then prints it, and all this gets sent to the client browser)

Sure, it's easy to create some kind of indicator in a shell script, but your browser would never see it.

That's not to say it's not possible to do what you want (it's certainly possible), but perhaps this is not the best forum to answer your question. It's more of a web thing than a shell thing.

One thing I've seen implemented in the past is some sort of message and/or icon that indicates there is something going on in the background. Not necessarily a progress meter, but just something that says "Hey, I'm busy, gimme a sec". You could have a pop-up box or a div that shows a spinning hour glass and the text "Working...".

This would indicate to your users that something is happening in the background and they should wait. It doesn't tell them how far along the process is but it should be enough to just tell them to be patient. If you don't do anything but wait people will assume they've lost connection or there's a problem with the server (which is probably why you posted the message in the first place).

Thanks for the replys.

The users issue this script from a BASH prompt. So even if there can see some sort of hash marks that go by the screen, similar to when installing a rpm using the install verbose hash flags would be great.

I will keep searching around for this. Thanks again.

Jaysunn

What you are trying to do is to create a progress bar. This is a crude (ksh) version of one that works only on a console window. Not gnome or whatever. search for other examples as 'progress bar in shell script'
This one has ten steps, your working code will call pbar only ten times.

Code:

#!/bin/ksh 

set -A disp '|x' '|xx' '|xxx' '|xxxx' '|xxxxx' '|xxxxxx' '|xxxxxxx' '|xxxxxxxx' '|xxxxxxxxx'

pbar()
{
   if [ $1 -gt 
   echo '\033[25;25H'${disp[$1]}'\033[25;37H|\n'
}

i=0  
clear
while :
do
   pbar $i
   i=$(( $i + 1 ))
   sleep 2
done

This is exactly what I am looking for to start modifying. Thanks Alot for all your replys.

Jaysunn