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Ask user to confirm

Terminal - Ask user to confirm
Confirm() { read -sn 1 -p "$1 [Y/N]? "; [[ $REPLY = [Yy] ]]; }
2010-11-22 11:01:14
User: frans
Functions: read
11
Up
Down
Ask user to confirm

Returns true if user presses the key.

Use it like

Confirm "Continue" && do action
Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
Confirm() { echo -n "$1 [y/n]? " ; read reply; case $reply in Y*|y*) true ;; *) false ;; esac }
2010-11-22 16:54:16
User: eikenberry
Functions: echo false read true
Tags: read
2
Up
Down
Ask user to confirm

This version works across on all POSIX compliant shell variants.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

It's usually good UI to display the response so the user can confirm that he really did press the wrong key so I would recommend leaving of the -s.

If you'd like to have an echo after the prompt so the next output is not on the same line as the prompt, you can do one of these:

confirm() { read -n 1 -p "$1 [Y/N]? "; [[ $REPLY = [Yy] ]] && echo || { echo; return 1;} } confirm() { read -n 1 -p "$1 [Y/N]? "; [[ $REPLY = [Yy] ]]; local r=$?; echo; return $r; }
Comment by dennisw 130 weeks and 3 days ago

The fact is that in scripts where i used that, i used the verbosity of the involved action like:

Confirm "Delete files" && rm -v $Files || echo "cancelled"
Comment by frans 130 weeks and 2 days ago

how do i halt the script if user pressed N at

Confirm() { read -sn 1 -p "$1 [Y/N]? "; [[ $REPLY = [Yy] ]]; } Confirm "Continue?"
Comment by rubo77 77 weeks and 1 day ago

if you mean 'exit', then it's simply:

Confirm "Continue" || exit

The "?" is already in the function so there's no need to pass it in the parameter.

Comment by frans 77 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

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