SUMMARY: read with timeout?

[sverre@research.nokia.com (Sverre Slotte)]

Last week I asked:

    Is there a way to give the read-command (in zsh) a timeout-value?

I got two answers. Vinnie Shelton <shelton@icd.teradyne.com> suggested
I use expect, and Karl Vogel <vogelke@c17mis.wpafb.af.mil> recommended
grabchars (from comp.sources.misc volume 12).

Both of these will obviously work with any shell.

Expect seemed like overkill, so I had a closer look at grabchars. It
does exactly what I want. In fact, it does things I didn't even know I
wanted:

    grabchars -ccfmos -df -t10 -L
               ^       ^   ^    ^
               |       |   |    |
               |       |   |    +---- fold to lower case
               |       |   +--------- timeout 10 seconds
               |       +------------- default value `f'
               +--------------------- valid characters

The binary is small and compact, 24576 bytes on SunOS (dyn.linked).

This version of grabchars is rather old: 1.9. (Copyright (c) 1988,
1989, 1990, Dan Smith). Does anyone know of a newer version?

Thanks for your help,

Sverre

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Sverre Slotte                            Internet: sverre@research.nokia.com
Nokia Research Center                    Phone:             + 358 0 43766208
P.O.Box 45, 00211 Helsingfors, Finland   Phax:              + 358 0 43766856
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