time clock program

UNIX for Beginners Q & A UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers
1

How would you write a program that would continually show the time in HOURS:MINUTES on an ASCII terminal(not just xclock)?

2

An ascii terminal that you continue to type on? You could write the program using UNIX curses/ansiC. Do a 'man curses'.

Cheers,

Keith

3

you could also include the time as a PS1 variable to alter your prompt, however this is not continually updated, so your time will not be refreshed until you hit enter.

4

I'm not sure exactly how you want to use what you're talking about, but you could do something goofy like this (saving the script as "showtime.sh" ):

#!/bin/sh
clear
date +"%r"
sleep 1
/Users/$USER/bin/showtime.sh

-Cassj

5

Re: cassj's script - might cause system slowdown. The last line will launch a new process without terminating the current process, ie. after ten minutes you will have 600 processes all running showtime.sh.

6

Thanks Ygor. Sorry if I inadvertently wrote a virus :frowning: How about this:

#!/bin/sh
while [ 0 = 0 ] ; do
  clear
  date +"%r"
  sleep 1
done

I'm not a UNIX expert. I guess I know enough to be dangerous :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I couldn't find a way yet to make an infinite loop except for something like the "while" statement above. I'm using the default terminal in Mac OS X (10.3.1) Panther.

Regards,
Cassj