Zenity progress bar and output

Question

I wrote this little script:

response=$(process ...) | zenity --progress --pulsate
echo $response

I want read the response of the process, whatever it is, and show a pulsating progress bar in the meanwhile. The problem is that I don't read any response at the end. I think because all the output from the previous process is sent to zenity.

Answer 1

Um, no, this is wrong. You assign something to the variable $response and then pipe this assignment to zenity. Try

process | tee /tmp/response.txt | zenity --progress --pulsate --auto-close
response=$( cat /tmp/response.txt )

That way, the output will be stored in the file /tmp/response.txt, which you can later read into a variable.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and didn't want to create a temp file, so my solution was:

#!/bin/bash
FIFO=$(mktemp -u)
mkfifo $FIFO
(cat $FIFO | zenity --progress --pulsate --auto-close) &

response=$(process)

echo 'Bye bye' > $FIFO
rm -f $FIFO