Display Spinner while waiting for some process to finish How can I show spinner till command line finish it is job? In other words, If I am running a script and I want to show spinner while this script is running and the spinner disappears when the script finish it is job. Bellow is a common spinner code: i=1 sp="/-\|" echo -n ' ' while true do printf "\b${sp:i++%${#sp}:1}" done How can I link the previous spinner code to a command to let it show spinner while the command is running and the spinner disappears when the command finish it is job? If I include the command inside the loop it will loop with the spinner so what is the solution in this case?

Have your `while` loop watch for your real command to exit. I'll assume a Linux environment that has /proc entries for each PID, but you could slice it other ways:


#!/bin/bash
# your real command here, instead of sleep
sleep 7 &
PID=$!
i=1
sp="/-\|"
echo -n ' '
while [ -d /proc/$PID ]
do
printf "\b${sp:i++%${#sp}:1}"
done