Comments on: HowTo: Add Pause Prompt In a Shell Script ( bash pause command )

By: Spaldam

Spaldam — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:53:17 +0000

It’s not working for me. I’m not sure why. The loop just keeps going.

By: Scott Dunn

Scott Dunn — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:21:39 +0000

Thank you. I learned that the not so hard way. Trying it. :)

By: Bhanu

Bhanu — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:46:47 +0000

This code worked for me well!

I am looking to pause the script multiple times. So, I used multiple pause statements after every 10 lines. It didn’t work.

Does anyone know why?

Thanks.

By: Augustus

Augustus — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:45:54 +0000

The code worked except the comment should read “Press the ENTER key to continue…”.
Thank you!

By: roger

roger — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 01:39:36 +0000

Thanks worked perfectly. Wonder why they don’t have this as a bash command…

By: JW

JW — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:32:17 +0000

Thanks for script, I put it at the end of a function and it is helpful. How would I call a function when Enter is pressed? I tried the following but it didn’t work:

function pause(){
read -p “$*”
Function_1
}
pause “Enter to continue…”

By: tom3k

tom3k — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:06:16 +0000

for anyone writing any cli based php scripts, and who doesnt feel like installing the whole ncurses package JUST to get the ‘press enter to continue…’ functionality…

this method works great via

system(‘read…..

thanks! +5

By: Sanchit

Sanchit — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:56:38 +0000

Hi,
I have one unix script file that has one command to execute a java program. That Java program is used to download a file from a server. After this command I have different commands (“hdiutil checksum -type CRC32 “) to execute on the downloaded file. My problem is that after executing the java command it is not waiting for the file to be downloaded from the server and executing that command and fails because still that file is not downloaded.

Can someone help me to resolve this issue. How should I wait fro the file to be downloaded then only it should execute the other commands?

Please help me to get out in to this situation as soon as possible…

By: Pai

Pai — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:25:12 +0000

echo “Press any Key to continue”
read -n1 -t5 any_key

-n1 -> number of character it can read
-t5 -> it will wait for 5 seconds the user to enter a char after 5 sec it will resume the flow

By: g00ner

g00ner — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:17:13 +0000

Being a windows admin this was of great help.

By: christ

christ — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:18:42 +0000

 read is a good choice for pausing but, sometimes we are looking for - pause then continue command without user interference so i guess  sleep   is more realiable

By: Diven

Diven — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:23:00 +0000

I believe the following is at least very close to the behavior of the pause command.

function pause(){ read -s -n 1 -p "Press any key to continue . . ." echo }

By: LeMMiNGS

LeMMiNGS — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:35:00 +0000

Cool to know that that works out aswell!!

By: Alison

Alison — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:51:04 +0000

Lifesaver. Thankyou. :)

(I needed to put in a “are you sure” message for windows users to be able to run scripts on a Linux box… who knows if it will help, but hey, at least it’s a start.)

By: anders

anders — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:21:47 +0000

Using simply read to pause>nul can be quite useful too.

I ran into the need for pause in this simple bash script, where I pass a website as argument and the script tells me the password to the site from my personal password file. Note: one site and one password on each line, file mode should be 600.
The script is useful to have on my webserver which is always on and I can reach from work or anywhere whenever I need it.

#!/bin/bash
cat ~/my_passwords.txt | grep $1; read; clear;

Hope this helps someone :-)

By: Smith

Smith — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:48:39 +0000

read -p “Press any key”. doesn’t provide the ‘pause’ behavior.

It requires ‘ENTER’ key to be pressed, so it becomes, ‘press ENTER key’ instead of ‘press any key’.

By: Gilles Allard

Gilles Allard — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 21:11:21 +0000

If you need an exact replacement for PAUSE you need to use:
read -n 1 -p prompt
without -n, read will require the ENTER key.
I’m not sure but -n may be a bash specific.

By: bhaskar

bhaskar — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:37:23 +0000

One small tip,
If you do this in a while loop that reads from a file.
e.g.
while read line
do
…..
read -p somevar
…..
done < somefile

It will not work as expected, as the input for the while loop is “somefile”, so the “read -p ” inside the loop will read a line from somefile, instead of standard input.

To solve this you can use file descriptors.

exec 5

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:46:24 +0000

Sleep puts a delay for a specified amount of time w/o a prompt. So you need to use read –p so that user can hit a key.

By: mne

mne — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:41:41 +0000

What about SLEEP command?