Bash - read white spaces


 
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# 1  
Old 02-12-2012
Bash - read white spaces

Hello!
I have one problem with my bash script - I would like to be able to read white space characters from stdin (for example single " ") - can I acomplish that somehow? I need to read only one character at the time, so I use
Code:
read -s -n 1 var

but it doesn't work for whitespaces apparently.

Thanks in advance.
# 2  
Old 02-12-2012
try:
Code:
IFS= read -r

This User Gave Thanks to Scrutinizer For This Post:
# 3  
Old 02-13-2012
It seems that it doesn't work the way I need. Let's say I want to read one character at time from the stdin (including spaces) in silent mode, and then print this character after some modifications, for example in different color. How can I achieve that?
# 4  
Old 02-13-2012
In what way does it 'not work'? It works perfectly fine here:

Code:
echo "    " | while IFS= read -n 1 VAR ; do echo "'$VAR'" ; done
' '
' '
' '
' '
''

Four whitespace characters read one at a time.
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