<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 16, 2015, at 10:25, Jeff Frontz <<a href="mailto:jeff.frontz@gmail.com" class="">jeff.frontz@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Rick Hornsby <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:richardjhornsby@gmail.com" target="_blank" class="">richardjhornsby@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I think I understand the problem - what's happening is that because there's an input pipe to bash, read takes the next line of the script as its input instead of taking it from the user - they're both on stdin.</blockquote></div><br class="">If I understand your question/scenario, you probably want to redirect your read from /dev/tty (a la "$ read < /dev/tty someVariable"). You can also use the tty command to figure out if there is actually a tty associated with the shell (e.g., to provide some useful default behavior if the script is run from, say, a crontab or at job).</div></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>This particular script will always be run interactively. The tasks it accomplishes may later be rolled into a kickstart type thing, but at that point I'll be looking at a rewrite and the need for a prompt will go away.</div></div><div><br class=""></div><div>The /dev/tty thing looks perfect, and appears in my little test stub to be doing exactly what I need. It makes sense why it works, but I hadn't thought of that.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>This is a very simple solution that's extremely readable - far more than the fork inversion things.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>thanks!</div></body></html>