script-wizard

script-wizard is a shell script helper program to delegate the responsibility of asking questions to the user, asking for confirmation, making selections, etc. The normalized response is printed to stdout for the script to consume.

Please see the documentation page on docs.rs

lib.rs:

script-wizard is a shell script (Bash) helper program, to delegate the responsibility of asking questions to the user, asking for confirmation, making selections, etc. The normalized response is printed to stdout for the script to consume.

This is a single binary application written in Rust and it utilizes the inquire library for providing a nicer user interface than the typical shell script is capable of.

Source code

The source code is hosted at github EnigmaCurry/script-wizard

Install with cargo

cargo install script_wizard

Install without cargo

Grab the latest release from github or run this command to download and install automatically:

cd ~/Downloads
ARCHIVE=script-wizard-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m).tar.gz
curl -LO https://github.com/Enigmacurry/script-wizard/releases/latest/download/${ARCHIVE}
tar xfv ${ARCHIVE}
sudo install script-wizard /usr/local/bin/script-wizard

Examples in Bash

ask

Ask the user a question and capture the response:

# Set the alias to make it easier to use:
alias ask='script-wizard ask'

# Record the user's response into the NAME variable:
NAME=$(ask "What is your name?")

confirm

Ask the user a yes/no question, with a prepared default response (eg. yes is the default here) :

# Set the alias to make it easier to use:
alias confirm='script-wizard confirm'

# Confirm returns an exit code: 0=yes 1=no :
if confirm "Do you like Linux?" yes; then
  echo "Tux is great!"
else
  echo "Well, thats ok."
fi

# But maybe you want to record a literal "true" or "false" into a variable?:
LIKES_LINUX=$(confirm "Do you like Linux?" yes && echo "true" || echo "false")

choose

Present a list of options to the user and have them select a single response from the list:

# Set the alias to make it easier to use:
alias choose='script-wizard choose'

CHOSEN=$(choose "Select your character class" "Rogue" "Wizard" "Paladin" "Cleric" "Bard")
# You can use an option from a bash array too:
options=("red" "blue" "greenish orange" "purple")
COLOR=$(choose "Choose a color" "${options[@]}")

select

Present a list of options to the user and have them select multiple responses (zero or more) from the list:

readarray -t SELECTED < <(script-wizard select "Which games do you like?" "Rocket League" "Portal" "Quake" "Magic the Gathering")

echo "These are the games you said you like:"
# Use printf to print one per line (echo would merge into one line):
printf '%s\n' "${SELECTED[@]}"

date

Present a date picker to the user:

# Pick a date between 2023/10/01 and 2023/10/20:
DATE=$(script-wizard date "Enter a date" --week-start monday --format "%Y-%m-%d" --min-date "2023-10-01" --max-date "2023-10-20" --help-message "yadda yadda")

editor

Present a full text editor entry to the user:

BIOGRAPHY=$(script-wizard editor "Tell me alllll about yourself" --default "# Describe yourself" --json | sed 's/^[^\"]*//')

Watch out: There is a potential bug here if your editor prints anything to stdout. (In the case of emacsclient, it undesirably captures the text "Waiting for Emacs...".) Using --json will wrap the correct editor text in double quotes, and pipeing the output through sed 's/^[^\"]*//' will remove the text before the first double quote.)

Set the common EDITOR environment variable to choose the editor it launches.

menu

Present a menu of command entries that the user can select and execute. The entries must be specified in the format: ENTRY = COMMAND where ENTRY is the text line of the menu entry, and COMMAND is the shell command to run if the entry is selected:

script-wizard menu --once "main menu" "print username = whoami"  "print all users = cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ':' -f 1"

Common options

• --json - the default is to print raw text even if it spans multiple lines. If you specify --json it will print it as compact JSON on a single line, splitting lines into lists of strings, or as a quoted string if its just supposed to be one line, depending on the subcommand.