Read into read

I encountered a case where I'm in the middle of a loop that read through a file through the 'read' command, like,

  while read a b c

  do

    .. (do something) ..

    # need user to input something

    read X

    .. (do some more things) ..

  done < file.txt

The 'read X' inside the loop will read data from the file 'file.txt' instead of console.

To solve the problem, simple change the 'read X' into

  read X < /dev/console

that forces the script reads the input from the terminal.

If you are connecting using SSH, replace /dev/console with your current console device.  You can see your current terminal device file by the environment variable $SSH_TTY (for OpenSSH) that usually is /dev/pts/0, /dev/pts/1 and so on.