how to test if a pipe contains data

[Christof Warlich]

Am 23.01.2012 10:10, schrieb Sven-Göran Bergh
> Without questioning you motives there is a dirty line that you may use if you are
> willing to wait 1 sec for the result:
>
> ash -c "busybox timeout -t 1 ash -c 'read -n0'"&>  /dev/null
>
> returns 0 on success and 143 on failure/timeout.
>
> However, it IS hackish and I would recommend looking into the C-wrapper solution
> as Laurent suggested.
>
> /Sven
>
Thanks a lot for that! As you may have seen in my other answer, I have to
live with a rather unpleasant occasional reboot anyway, so some hack before
doing that would not hurt too much, and neither does an additional second
waiting time.