Shell Scripting Tutorial: Reading Cursor, Function Keys

My preferred shell for interactive scripting is bash because of the readline library and the extensions to the read command. In this article, I will forsake portability for the clarity of bash (version 2 or later). If you want to use stty and dd, the principles are the same. You can find out more about using dd in Mouse Reporting in a Shell Script and Trapping Special Characters in the Korn Shell; the techniques in this article are similar to the ones discussed there.