How to take input from user until a specific character appears

reno_queen

How can I read from standard input until a specific character appears like in the example: while [[ input is not $ ]]; do read -p ... for ... done

Originally asked by KolinMccun on Stack Exchange (askubuntu) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

You could use read with $ as a delimiter. read will stop reading from the standard input as soon as it encounters the delimiter. For this, you don't really need a loop. #!/bin/bash read -d '$' -p 'input characters: ' REPLY [[ $? = 0 ]] && printf 'Jackpot! You typed: %s\n' "$REPLY" On the other hand, if you want to check characters before printed to the screen, then you can use the parameter -N to instruct read to interrupt after reading one character, where you can break before anything printed. #!/bin/bash echo -n 'input characters: ' while read -N 1 -s -r; do [[ $REPLY = $ ]] && \ { printf '\njackpot! you typed: %s\n' $; break; } || printf %s "$REPLY" done

Full answer by user986805: https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/1292094 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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