Dial Tool

I saw this when running Solaris 10's setup_install_server program on their first install CD. It was kinda cool, so I captured it here.

The dial script was simply

#!/bin/sh
state=0
while [ 1 ]
do case $state in
      0) echo "|\b\c"
         state=1 ;;
      1) echo "/\b\c"
         state=2 ;;
      2) echo "-\b\c"
         state=3 ;;
      3) echo "\\" "\b\b\c"
         state=0 ;;
   esac
   sleep 1
done

The way you called it from another script that was about to do a long-running task, was to

  dial &
  dial_pid=$!

the presumption is this long-running task didn't produce any significant output.

When that long-running task finished, you can then

   kill $dial_pid

Cute.


This page was last updated: Tuesday, 24-Oct-2006 16:30:05 Pacific Daylight Time