Question

I’m using the bourne shell in UNIX, and am running into the following problem:

#!/bin/sh


while read line
   do

  echo $line

  if [ $x = "true" ]
  then
        echo "something"
        read choice
        echo $choice
  else
        echo "something"
  fi

done <file.txt

The problem I have here is that UNIX will not wait for user input in the read command – it just plows on through instead of waiting for what the user types in. How can I make unix wait for user input?

Answer 1

It is because you are asking the program to read from the file file.txt:

done <file.txt

Also looks like you have a typo here:

if [ $x = "true" ]
     ^^

which should be "$line".
Also note the ", without them your program will break if the word read from the file has a space in it.