[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> If "read -t" times out without fulfilling a request, any pending data is
> lost.
> Via strace it's apparent that the problem is that when the user requests a
> line of
> data, bash read is actually calling read() with a buffer size of one. So bash
> is
> holding the data. It's not in the OS file buffer. Then when the timeout
> occurs,
> bash does not return the read data to the user, or associate it with the file
> descriptor.
As I read the documentation for bash I see the following:
-t timeout
Cause read to time out and return failure if a
complete line of input is not read within timeout
seconds.
Therefore if a "complete line of input" has not yet been received when
a timeout occurs it does not matter if data is pending or not. The
read will return failure.
I believe in the case of a timeout that the current behavior is the
correct thing to do. The error handling model is simple. Returning
partial data upon timeout would require a much more complicated error
handling strategy to be implemented by the shell script and all shell
scripts would need to pay that implementation penalty.
Bob
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