Read Syntax

[Aaron1940]

Anyone know the read syntax in linux? I need to create a script to read the date I enter and replace that as the extension of the file.

thanks.

 

[ericbrunson]

did you try "man read"?

 

[SamBones]

I believe it's: [tt]man bash[/tt]

Or...

read [-ers] [-t timeout] [-a aname] [-p prompt] [-n nchars] [-d delim] [name ...]

One  line  is read from the standard input, and the first word is assigned to the first name, the second word to the second name, and so on, with leftover words and their intervening separators assigned to the last  name.   If  there are fewer words read from the standard input than names, the remaining names are assigned empty values.  The characters in IFS are used to split the line into words.   The  backslash character (\) may be used to remove any special meaning for the next character read and for line continuation.  Options, if supplied, have the following meanings:

-a aname
       The words are assigned to sequential indices of the
       array variable aname, starting at  0.   aname is
       unset before any new values are assigned.  Other
       name arguments are ignored.
-d delim
       The first character of delim is used to terminate the
       input line, rather than newline.
-e     If  the standard input is coming from a terminal,
       readline (see READLINE above) is used to obtain
       the line.
-n nchars
       read returns after reading nchars characters rather
       than waiting for a complete line of input.
-p prompt
       Display prompt, without a trailing newline, before
       attempting to read any input.  The  prompt  is
       displayed only if input is coming from a terminal.
-r     Backslash  does  not  act  as an escape character.
       The backslash is considered to be part of the
       line.  In particular, a backslash-newline pair may
       not be used as a line continuation.
-s     Silent mode.  If input is coming from a terminal,
       characters are not echoed.
-t timeout
       Cause read to time out and return failure if a
       complete line of input is not read within  timeout
       seconds.  This option has no effect if read is not
       reading input from the terminal or a pipe.

If  no  names  are  supplied, the line read is assigned to the variable REPLY.  The return code is zero, unless end-of-file is encountered or read times out.

Hope this helps.

 

[ericbrunson]

And did *you* try "man read"? It pulls up the bash builtins docs. Neat how that works, isn't it?

 

[SamBones]

*me*?

Yes, I did try [tt]man read[/tt]. On my Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, [tt]man read[/tt] doesn't bring up anything useful. My bad though, it looks like someone botched up some of the man pages.

Sorry 'bout that!