A small unix tip today.

Do you want to continue ?

If you are expecting “y” or “n” but do not want to enforce the user to type y[Enter] but simply y, you can use the -n option in bash.

Within a ksh script:

yorn=$(bash -c 'read -p "Do you want to continue ? " -n 1 ans;echo "$ans"')

Within bash:

read -n 1 yorn