How to prompt user for input in shell script?

Question

I have a shell script in which I would like to prompt the user with a dialog box for inputs when the script is executed.

example (after script has started) :

"Enter the files you would like to install : "

user input : spreadsheet json diffTool

where $1 = spreadsheet, $2 = json, $3 = diffTool

then loop through each user input and do something like

for var in "$@"
do
    echo "input is : $var"
done

How would I go about doing this within my shell script?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

You need to use the read built-in available in bash and store the multiple user inputs into variables,

read -p "Enter the files you would like to install: " arg1 arg2 arg3

Give your inputs separated by space. For example, when running the above,

Enter the files you would like to install: spreadsheet json diffTool

now each of the above inputs are available in the variables arg1,arg2 and arg3

---

The above part answers your question in way, you can enter the user input in one go space separated, but if you are interested in reading multiple in a loop, with multiple prompts, here is how you do it in bash shell. The logic below get user input until the Enter key is pressed,

#!/bin/bash

input="junk"
inputArray=()

while [ "$input" != "" ] 
do 
   read -p "Enter the files you would like to install: " input
   inputArray+=("$input")
done

Now all your user inputs are stored in the array inputArray which you can loop over to read the values. To print them all in one shot, do

printf "%s\n" "${inputArray[@]}"

Or a more proper loop would be to

for arg in "${inputArray[@]}"; do
    [ ! -z "$arg" ] && printf "%s\n" "$arg"
done

and access individual elements as "${inputArray[0]}", "${inputArray[1]}" and so on.