bash script - delay between words echo command

Question

How can I have a delay between words to simulate an actual human typing all in one horizontal line? For loops only display vertically as far as I know.

This pseudocode is what I have in mind:

    echo "hello" && sleep 1 && echo "world" && sleep 1 && echo "!"

Something like that.

What do you mean "for loops only display vertically"? You can write a loop as for i in a b c; do echo "$i"; done, but I don't see how that addresses the question at all. I guess you could do for word in hello world \!; do echo "$word" && sleep 1; done — William Pursell
– William Pursell, Commented May 5, 2022 at 19:53
expect can actually simulate typing, with delays between each character. For fun, run 99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-expect-249.html — glenn jackman
– glenn jackman, Commented May 5, 2022 at 20:05
echo -n "hello" && sleep 1 && echo -n " world" && sleep 1 && echo "!"? — Cyrus
– Cyrus, Commented May 5, 2022 at 20:21

Avishai Barnoy · Accepted Answer · 2022-05-05 20:01:52Z

2

This is actually quite a cool tool called pv standing for pipe viewer, but can simulate what you're looking for, I found the answer here.

TL;DR:

echo "You can simulate on-screen typing just like in the movies" | pv -qL 10

A little longer answer:

pv allows you to monitor data sent through a pipe, hence pipe viewer. This is done visually and therefore it has visual monitoring capabilities. In your case we use

L - this limits the character transfer rate, bytes-per-second q - quiet, otherwise you will a breakdown analysis of how long each package took to go through the pipe.

answered May 5, 2022 at 20:01

Avishai Barnoy

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5 Comments

randomx Over a year ago

thnx, i tried it and really liked it. how would you add that to a shell script without the giving you the error 'Syntax error: "(" unexpected'?

Avishai Barnoy Over a year ago

When I ran it in a script it worked. Maybe edit the original question with an example script so we can try and debug it?

Avishai Barnoy Over a year ago

Do you have a shebang '/bin/bash' of some sort at the beginning of your script?

randomx Over a year ago

correct. line #!/bin/bash was there. could you please post your 2-liner? the shebang + the pv command? so close yet so far away lol this is what i have #!/bin/bash echo "hello world" | pv -qL $[10+(-2 + RANDOM%5)]

randomx Over a year ago

i think i figured it out, i needed to run from the shell: /bin/bash test.sh i was using just sh test.sh --behavior i have never seen before. usually sh does it for me. thank you for all your help

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