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Read a keypress without echoing it

Terminal - Read a keypress without echoing it
stty cbreak -echo; KEY=$(dd bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null); stty -cbreak echo
2009-06-09 13:15:49
User: inof
Functions: dd stty
5
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Read a keypress without echoing it

This shell snippet reads a single keypress from stdin and stores it in the $KEY variable.

You do NOT have to press the enter key!

The key is NOT echoed to stdout!

This is useful for implementing simple text menus in scripts and similar things.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

This is very interesting, and could be helpful for some of my scripts :)

Comment by leviself 205 weeks and 6 days ago

The read command actually does this for you. -s for silent (i.e. no echo), and -n1 to tell it that you only want the one character read.

read -s -n1 KEY

Comment by Hobbletoe 205 weeks and 5 days ago

wow i came to favourite inof's, but hobbletoe's seems even awesomer! definitely have some scripts that will be improved by this!

Comment by cephi 205 weeks and 3 days ago

Hobbletoe: "read -s" is non-standard and not portable. I guess it works only with bash (I don't have a bash here, so I can't test, but none of my other bourne shell implementations support it).

Comment by inof 204 weeks and 6 days ago

Your point of view

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