Passing arguments to an interactive program non-interactively

bash interactive non-interactive
sidharth sharma picture sidharth sharma · Jan 18, 2013 · Viewed 111.1k times · Source

I have a bash script that employs the read command to read arguments to commands interactively, for example yes/no options. Is there a way to call this script in a non-interactive script passing default option values as arguments?

It's not just one option that I have to pass to the interactive script.

Answer

glenn jackman picture glenn jackman · Jan 18, 2013

Many ways

pipe your input

echo "yes
no
maybe" | your_program

redirect from a file

your_program < answers.txt

use a here document (this can be very readable)

your_program << ANSWERS
yes
no
maybe
ANSWERS

use a here string

your_program <<< $'yes\nno\nmaybe\n'

Related questions

How to concatenate string variables in Bash

In PHP, strings are concatenated together as follows: $foo = "Hello"; $foo .= " World"; Here, $foo becomes "Hello World". How is this accomplished in Bash?

Read More
How can I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script?

What command can be used to check if a directory exists or not, within a Bash shell script?

Read More
How do I tell if a regular file does not exist in Bash?

I've used the following script to see if a file exists: #!/bin/bash FILE=$1 if [ -f $FILE ]; then echo "File $FILE exists." else echo "File $FILE does not exist." fi What's the correct syntax to use if I only want …

Read More