Accept newline in bash script

Question

I have the following script that continuously accepts input from the user until he/she enters some form of y* or Y*.

while true; do
read -p "Are you ready? " yn
case $yn in
    [Yy]* ) break;;
    [Nn]* ) ;;
    * ) echo "Please answer yes or no.";;
esac
done

However, I would like to break out of the while loop when the user simply presses enter. I tried using \n, \r, and \r\n but these don't seem to be the right patterns.

I am using Cygwin if that makes a difference (though I would also like to know the answer for a Linux distribution like Ubuntu).

randomir · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-08 23:23:08Z

4

Because read strips the newline, you'll have to match an empty string, "":

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
    read -p "Are you ready? " yn
    case "$yn" in
        [Yy]*|"") break;;
        [Nn]*) ;;
        *) echo "Please answer yes or no.";;
    esac
done

Depending on your application logic, you can (obviously) make that a separate case branch, like: "") break;;.

answered Jul 8, 2017 at 23:23

randomir

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