I basically have a bash script which executes 5 commands in a row. I want to add a logic which asks me "Do you want to execute command A" and if I say YES, the command is executed, else the script jumps to another line and I see the prompt "Do you want to execute command B".
The script is very simple and looks like this
echo "Running A"
commandA &
sleep 2s;
echo "done!"
echo "Running B"
commandB &
sleep 2s;
echo "done!"
...
Use the read builtin to get input from the user.
read -p "Run command $foo? [yn]" answer
if [[ $answer = y ]] ; then
# run the command
fi
Put the above into a function that takes the command (and possibly the prompt) as an argument if you're going to do that multiple times.
[[. Are you sure you're using bash, with #! /bin/bash as the first line of your script?#! /bin/bash on the first line. I guess that may be the problem as I did not explicitly said it's bash.
[[ and $ and ; matter in some ridiculous way, I found,..You want the Bash read builtin. You can perform this in a loop using the implicit REPLY variable like so:
for cmd in "echo A" "echo B"; do
read -p "Run command $cmd? "
if [[ ${REPLY,,} =~ ^y ]]; then
eval "$cmd"
echo "Done!"
fi
done
This will loop through all your commands, prompt the user for each one, and then execute the command only if the first letter of the user's response is a Y or y character. Hope that helps!
eval if you can. One idea would be to encapsulate each command in a function which either describes itself or runs itself depending on how you invoke it.
${,,} requires Bash 4. And see BashFAQ/050.
&and sleeping there? you should run it synchronously...