Shell Programming and Scripting

Jean-Pierre, I really appreciate your help. What you've suggested is very close to what I am trying to achiveve with one difference only: the input is displayed only after return hit and I want it to be displayed after CTRL+D also,
i.e. asdfasdfasdfCTRL+D and I want the stdout to be asdfasdfasdf and to return to the console.
Can you tell me how to accomplish this?

blahblahblahblahblah

I've noticed that, on the BASH shell, 'read' may return input even when it's returning error when stdin closes. Try one last echo to see if you actually got it.

You can do something like this :

Code:

while read input
do
   echo "Input value: $input"
   last_input="$input"
done
echo "We are at EOF"
echo "The last input was: $last_input"

Jean-Pierre.

The Bash read built-in has the -d option so you can specify a delimiter other than newline...

Code:

read -d '^D' input

...where '^D' is 'Ctrl-V Ctrl-D'.

Thanks for you suggestions everyone. I ended up using your last one Jean-Pierre and though it is not exactly what I was looking for it helped me do what I want.