Enhancing scripts with read prompts
We have seen how we can use the built in read to populate a variable. So far, we have used echo
to produce the prompt but this can be passed to read itself using the -p
option. The read
command will surpass the additional linefeed, so we reduce both the line count and the complexity to some degree.
We can test this at the command line itself. Try typing the following command to see read
in action:
$ read -p "Enter your name: " name
We use the read
command with the -p
option. The argument that follows the option is the text that appears in the prompt. Normally, we will make sure that there is a trailing space at the end of the text to ensure that we can clearly see what we type. The last argument supplied here ...
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