Hey all,

I'm trying to write a menu in BASH that would accept a user's input with one kestroke. For instance, if the menu contained these options:

1) Beer
2) Cigarettes
3) Coffee

... a user could simply type the number three without having to press the enter key for the script to read the input. I've read through a couple of tutorials and they use the "echo -n" and "read" combination in their scripts which isn't what I want to do. I would like to minimize the amount of keystrokes a user would have to make.

I also happened upon the dialog utility to make text boxes for menus. Will this help in creating the one-keystroke functionality I'd like to have?

To change settings on in your term you have to make changes the terminal driver. You can do this by using the "stty" command. I wasn't quite sure how to read one character from the stdin so I googled for it and it seems to work well.

Hope this helps,
cludwin


#!/bin/sh

# global var to hold menu selection
MENU_CHOISE=""

function get_choise() {
##################################
# set the tty driver to raw mode #
# read a char #
# restore settings #
##################################
stty raw
MENU_CHOISE=`dd if=/dev/tty bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null`
stty sane
echo $MENU_CHOISE
}

# print the menu
echo "Menu:"
echo " 1) booz"
echo " 2) smokes"
echo " 3) tea"
printf " please enter your choise: "

# read the menu selection
get_choise

# print the results.
case $MENU_CHOISE in

"1")
echo "Can I see some ID?";;

"2")
echo "Smoking is bad for you";;

"3")
echo "One lump or two?";;
esac

1 members found this post helpful.

http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/...10.html#ss10.1
thats the link for the user input page, it may be worthwhile you reading the whole thing though, it is a good tutorial

Thanks for taking the trouble in helping me suss this out.

I'd really like to use Dialog and BASH if I can, however.

I have two questions concerning dialog:

Firstly, how do I get two widgets operating on the same screen? Is it even possible? I'd like to have a menu on the left-hand side containing a list of items with a running total on the right-hand side.

Secondly, where does the data from the menu go? How do I assign it to a variable that would affect the running totals on the right hand side? Reading the man pages for Dialog, output from a menu goes to something called stderr. I would need to add the dollar value of each selected item, have that value listed in the "Running total" widget on the right-hand side, and then possibly save everything to a file.

Am I better trying to do this using only BASH? Should I take a look at python-tcl/tk?

AFAIK you can't use multiple widgets using Dialog.

I'm trying to write a menu in BASH that would accept a user's input with one kestroke.
Maybe "select"? Useless example:
select choice in quit bomb capitulate educate freeze jump k-line maim nuke obliterate submit tundra zygote; do case "$choice" in quit) echo To ${lastchoice} or not to ${lastchoice}, that is the $MYNAME dinarii question...; break;; *) lastchoice=$choice; export MYNAME=$(expr $MYNAME + $RANDOM);; esac; done