Small Bash Script to Count Seconds

So the short story is I got a small UPS for my tv, xbox and cable modem so that I won’t be interrupted by small power hiccups. I decided I wanted to know how long my CRT tv and xbox would continue while watching a movie so I needed something to count with while I unplugged the power to test it.

Now I’m sure others have written scripts and I could probably have just used the clock on the computer but I decided it couldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to write a script to do this. I knew that I basically had to just create a loop that would print a number increasing by one and then wait one second and repeat. I just had to find the right commands. About 10 to 15 minutes of searching later and I had this:

#!/bin/bash #A very basic time counting script. #init value of x x=1 #make y 1 less than x y=$((x-1)) echo "Counting from $y..." #Output what number we are beginning from while [ $x -ge 0 ] #While $x is >= 0 (all the time) do sleep 1 #Wait one second echo $x #Echo value of $x x=$((x+1)) #Increase $x by 1 done

Some of the methods are a little different from what I am used to. To increase $x by 1, I am used to $x++. Bash is different I guess. There may be simpler ways to do this as well. If so, please leave a comment as I’m hopeful to learn.

Sample output:
$ ./count.sh Counting from 0... 1 2 3 4 5

Also note this script will continue to run until the user types the escape sequence ‘Ctrl+C‘.

Some sources used to find what I needed: