timeout on read; Bourne Shell

[Daniel Smith - part of the caffeine generation]

In <1153 at mwtech.UUCP> martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:

> In article <1991May26.165314.21533 at midway.uchicago.edu> goer at ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
> >Is there any elegant way to achive a timeout on a read within
> >a shell script?  Perhaps even "fairly elegant" would do.  Even
> >a kludge?

	One way is to get the grabchars package, which allows for timeouts
and default answers (and more).

	A line such as:

score=`grabchars -d0 -b -n5 -t10 -r -q 'enter your score >> '`

	Will set $score to 0 if return is pressed as the first character,
or if 10 seconds go by.  -b means output to stdout and stderr (so that you
can see what you are typing, -t is # of seconds to time out, -n is # of
(up to) chars to get, -r means "allow return key".  You can get if from
comp.sources.misc archives on uunet and elsewhere, or directly from me.

				Daniel
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