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  • I know is not an answer to the question, but i had a similar issue, where I needed a values coming through STDIN stored in a variable, but read was halting my program and as mentioned if read times out if will empty the content of the variable, my solution was to use parameter expansion, what it does is, if it times out if assigns a "default" value to the variable... var=a while true do echo $var read -t 0.1 input input=${input:-$var} var=$input sleep 0.1 done as I said is not the right answer for you as you just wanted the key pressed and not the value entered... NOTE: whit this timings there Commented Jul 24, 2016 at 6:54