Arrow keys don't work in "read" command of bash 312

On 2006-02-02, Peter T. Breuer

You need to learn a little perseverance.

It's third on my man page. (Not that the section on the read builtin is very long.)

Or type "help read".

Here, you can carry it for a while:

read -ers -u fd -t timeout -a aname -p prompt -n nchars -d delim name ... One line is read from the standard input, or from the file descriptor fd supplied as an argument to the -u option, and the first word is buttigned to the first name, the second word to the second name, and so on, with leftover words and their interven- ing separators buttigned to the last name. If there are fewer words read from the input stream than names, the remaining names are buttigned 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 fol- lowing meanings: -a aname The words are buttigned to sequential indices of the array variable aname, starting at 0. aname is unset before any new values are buttigned. 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 on standard error, without a trailing new- line, 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 back- slash is considered to be part of the line. In particu- lar, a backslash-newline pair may not be used as a line continuation. -s Silent mode. If input is coming from a terminal, charac- ters 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. -u fd Read input from file descriptor fd.

If no names are supplied, the line read is buttigned to the vari- able REPLY. The return code is zero, unless end-of-file is encountered, read times out, or an invalid file descriptor is supplied as the argument to -u.

-- Shell Scripting Recipes: My code in this post, if any, A Problem-Solution Approach is released under the 2005, Apress GNU General Public Licence