Check if the Enter key is pressed in a linux bash script

Question

I want to check if the value entered by the user using the read command is the Enter key using if/elif statements in order to echo something. How should I do?

Answer 1

The \n at the end of the user's input is stripped off before assigning the value to the shell variable. If the user just presses ENTER, the value read will be the empty string.

read VAR
if [[ -z $VAR ]]; then echo "User pressed ENTER with no input text"; fi