Clearing the input buffer before a read.

[Ian! D. Allen [CGL]]

In my limited experience

   stty old new

will flush typeahead in a shell script that has a real tty from which
it is reading.  (BSD 4.3 Unix)
-- 
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) idallen at watcgl.uwaterloo.ca idallen at watcgl.waterloo.edu
 [129.97.128.64]  Computer Graphics Lab/University of Waterloo/Ontario/Canada