What is the Linux equivalent to DOS pause?

Question

I have a Bash shell script in which I would like to pause execution until the user presses a key. In DOS, this is easily accomplished with the \"pause\" command. Is there a

Answer 1

This worked for me on multiple flavors of Linux, where some of these other solutions did not (including the most popular ones here). I think it's more readable too...

echo Press enter to continue; read dummy;

Note that a variable needs to be supplied as an argument to read.

Answer 2

Try this:

function pause(){
   read -p "$*"
}

Answer 3

I use these ways a lot that are very short, and they are like @theunamedguy and @Jim solutions, but with timeout and silent mode in addition.

I especially love the last case and use it in a lot of scripts that run in a loop until the user presses Enter.

Commands

• Enter solution

  read -rsp $'Press enter to continue...\n'
  

• Escape solution (with -d $'\e')

  read -rsp $'Press escape to continue...\n' -d $'\e'
  

• Any key solution (with -n 1)

  read -rsp $'Press any key to continue...\n' -n 1 key
  # echo $key
  

• Question with preselected choice (with -ei $'Y')

  read -rp $'Are you sure (Y/n) : ' -ei $'Y' key;
  # echo $key
  

• Timeout solution (with -t 5)

  read -rsp $'Press any key or wait 5 seconds to continue...\n' -n 1 -t 5;
  

• Sleep enhanced alias

  read -rst 0.5; timeout=$?
  # echo $timeout
  

Explanation

-r specifies raw mode, which don't allow combined characters like "\" or "^".

-s specifies silent mode, and because we don't need keyboard output.

-p $'prompt' specifies the prompt, which need to be between $' and ' to let spaces and escaped characters. Be careful, you must put between single quotes with dollars symbol to benefit escaped characters, otherwise you can use simple quotes.

-d $'\e' specifies escappe as delimiter charater, so as a final character for current entry, this is possible to put any character but be careful to put a character that the user can type.

-n 1 specifies that it only needs a single character.

-e specifies readline mode.

-i $'Y' specifies Y as initial text in readline mode.

-t 5 specifies a timeout of 5 seconds

key serve in case you need to know the input, in -n1 case, the key that has been pressed.

$? serve to know the exit code of the last program, for read, 142 in case of timeout, 0 correct input. Put $? in a variable as soon as possible if you need to test it after somes commands, because all commands would rewrite $?

Answer 4

This function works in both bash and zsh, and ensures I/O to the terminal:

# Prompt for a keypress to continue. Customise prompt with $*
function pause {
  >/dev/tty printf '%s' "${*:-Press any key to continue... }"
  [[ $ZSH_VERSION ]] && read -krs  # Use -u0 to read from STDIN
  [[ $BASH_VERSION ]] && </dev/tty read -rsn1
  printf '\n'
}
export_function pause

Put it in your .{ba,z}shrc for Great Justice!

Answer 5

read -n1 is not portable. A portable way to do the same might be:

(   trap "stty $(stty -g;stty -icanon)" EXIT
    LC_ALL=C dd bs=1 count=1 >/dev/null 2>&1
)   </dev/tty

Besides using read, for just a press ENTER to continue prompt you could do:

sed -n q </dev/tty

Answer 6

read without any parameters will only continue if you press enter. The DOS pause command will continue if you press any key. Use read –n1 if you want this behaviour.