Re: piping messages to external scripts

[Culley Harrelson <harrelson@xxxxxxxxx>]

dialog is extremely cool!  All those freeBSD port install routines do not
look so complicated anymore.  Too bad you can't navigate the dialog with vi
keybindings.

culley

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Kyle Wheeler wrote:

> On Wednesday, March 19 at 02:22 PM, quoth Culley Harrelson:
> > I am ready to tackle this problem but when you pipe a message to a 
> > script it looks like a new process is spawned and the new process 
> > can't remain in control of the terminal.  Can anyone point me in the 
> > right direction to make this happen?
> 
> Eh? The new process remains in control of the terminal as long as it 
> wants (i.e. it can't give up control at any point). Here's the thing, 
> though: when you pipe a message to a script, you're filling the 
> standard input with the *message*. If you use typical shell prompting 
> mechanisms, they'll all try to pull from standard input, which will 
> either be the message or will be *closed* because you already slurped 
> it up with something. So, you can't use standard input.
> 
> Of course, without stdin, the question becomes: how do you get user 
> input? You have to use something more entertaining, like the curses 
> library. There's a handy utility that makes this sort of thing easy 
> from a shell script (or any other kind of script) called "dialog". You 
> can then do things like:
> 
>      #!/bin/sh
>      tmp=`mktemp -t menubox.XXXX`
>      dialog --menu "choose wisely" 0 0 0 \
>          1 'pick me' \
>          2 'no, really, pick me!' \
>          3 'forget those losers' \
>          4 'PICK ME!' 2>$tmp
>      read choice <$tmp
>      echo you picked $choice | less
> 
> Read dialog's documentation for all the other neat tricks you can do 
> with it---it's surprisingly powerful.
> 
> I'm sure there is probably a perl module out there that will do the 
> same thing.
> 
> ~Kyle
> -- 
> We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its 
> members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without 
> assistance from the legal structure of their country.
>                                                        -- Margaret Mead