Banner Countdown Timer

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

Hello. I am pretty new to unix and shell scripting and I was wondering if there might be a way to banner a countdown timer inside a script. We currently have an existing script that does a 2 minute sleep but thought it might be fun to actually make it banner a countdown timer until it is finished. Is this possible?

1 Like
2

What does "banner" mean when used as a verb here?

T=$((SECONDS+(2*60)))

while ((T > SECONDS))
do
        # \r returns to the beginning of the line and overwrites.
        printf "\r%02d:%02d" $(( (T-SECONDS)/60 )) $(( (T-SECONDS)%60 ))
        sleep 1
done
echo
3

Would this come close to what you envision?

SEC=10
printf -- '------------------------------------\n\e[s'
while (( --SEC ));   do  printf '\e[uwaiting %2d seconds\n' $SEC; sleep 1;  done
printf -- '------------------------------------\n'
4

The following runs with ksh or bash:

SEC=10; while (( SEC -= 1 )); do clear; ~tool/bin/banner " $SEC"; sleep 1; done

If your OS ships without a banner program, download and compile one!