Spinner Function for Shell Scripts

[Christian Weisgerber]

Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:

> >> So, just as the subject-line says, ... here's an efficient and robust
> >> spinner function compatible with many shells.
> >>                        DONE=$( /bin/sh -c 'read -t 0 DONE; echo $DONE' )
> > 
> > Is this expected to be portable to other operating systems? The dash
> > shell, used as /bin/bash in Ubuntu, does not acept the "-t" argument
> > to the read builtin command. Using /bin/bash solves the problem.
> 
> I was shooting for bourne-shell,

FreeBSD's /bin/sh is *not* a Bourne shell.

> It's rather unfortunate that bourne-shell has what we need but is not
> available on all operating systems since many OSes have started swapping
> out bourne-shell for it's younger cousin.

A traditional Bourne shell, such as Solaris's, does not implement
read -t at all.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de