Revision no.

: PPT/2K403/02

Advanced Scripting Techniques

 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Advanced Scripting Techniques

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• Reading Input with read.

• Shell Functions.

• Reading options with getopts.

• Signal handling with trap.

• Implementing simple Menus with select.

• Dialog Boxes with Dialog

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Reading Input with read

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– read can be used to read simple string or number,for ex

• echo “please read the number”
• read NUMBER
– read command is also able to read several lines of input,
The syntax is;
commands | while read VAR1 VAR2 while read VAR1 VAR2
do do
commands commands
done done < file

– With while loop, reads process the input line by line as available
from output of a command or from file.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Shell Functions
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– Shell function are defined at beginning of a Script.

– Shell function make whole script available under a single name.
– The syntax to define a function;
• functionname ( ) {
• commands
• commands
• }

– The function may be composed of any character string that then

can be used to call the function.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Reading Options With getopts

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– getopts is shell inbuilt in command, used to extract the options

supplied to script on the command line.
– Syntax for command is ; getopts optionstring VAR
– The optionstring describes all options to be specified,it is
followed by variable to which all command-line options specified
are assigned.
– The getopts command is mostly used in while loop together with
case as follows;
• while getopts optionstring VAR; do
• case $VAR in
• optionstring1 ) command1 ;;
• optionstring2 ) command2 ;;
• esac
• done

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Signal Handling with trap

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– Signals can be sent to any running process on the system with kill
command.
– Signal available on the system can be listed with kill –l .
– With exception of signal 9, Linux kernel sends all signals to given
process.
– Following shows some common signals;
• Signal 1 –SIGHUP-Shells send signal to all processes started by it.
• Signal 2 –SIGINT-The signal requests the process to exit.
• Signal 9 –SIGKILL-This signal is not handled by process but directly
by Kernel
• Signal 15 –SIGTERM- This is default signal started by Kill command.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Signal Handling with trap (contd.)

• Signal 18 –SIGCONT- This signal causes a process with the status “T”
(stopped or traced ) to continue.
• Signal 19 – SIGSTOP- It causes the process to suspended giving it
the status “T”.

– Shell scripts may behave in undesirable way,if it happens script

might leave a number of temporary files.
– The trap command helps to avoid this by running certain
commands.
– The trap command requires following syntax:
• trap command signal

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Implementing Simple Menus with select

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– With BASH , it is possible to create simple menus with help of

select built-in command.
– The syntax of select command;
• PS3=prompting-text
• select VARIABLE in item1 item2 item3
• do
• commands
• done

– In most cases, a case construct is used within the select loop to

define command for each item.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Dialog Boxes with dialog

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– The dialog package allows you to present different types of

boxes,for different task.

– Before dialog can created from shell script, you need install dialog
as an additional package.

– The dialog command requires this syntax:

– dialog –boxtype “text” height width

– Through KDE desktop, it is possible to create “real” graphical

user interface elements with kdialog.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Yes/No Box (yesno)

– The box displays some text and two buttons below for selecting
yes or no, Ex:
• dialog --yesno “Would you like to continue?” 10 50

– You can define also title for the box with - -title,

• dialog –title “yesno box” –yesno “would you like to continue?” 10 50

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Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Message Box (msgbox)

– This type of box allows you to display some text to user to

confirm the message by selecting ok button.

• dialog --msgbox “This is a message.” 10 50

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Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Input Box (input box)

– This type of dialog box, prompt the user to supply some kind of

input.

– The input is not directly processed by stored in to temporary file.

• dialog –inputbox “Please enter something.” 10 50

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Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Text Box (textbox)

– This type of box, displays the contents of text files.

• dialog –textbox /etc/passwd 10 50

– This displays the file /etc/passwd in text box.

– The user can close the box by selecting EXIT button.

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Menu Box (menu)

– This type of box,presents user with menu to select one item from

the list.

• dialog --menu “This is a menu.” 10 50 2 \

• “option 1” “This is this the first option” \

• “option 2” “This is this the second option”

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Check List Box (checklist)

– It is similar to menu box it presents a number of entries from
which to select.

– Any number of check boxes in the list can be activated or

deactivated.

• dialog –checklist “This is a checklist” 10 50 2 \

• “a” “This is one option” “off” \

• “b” “This is the second option” “on”

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Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Radio List Box (radiolist)

– It is similar to checklist box with the difference that only one of

the entries can be active at a time.

• dialog –radiolist “This is a selective list,where only one \

• option can be chosen” 10 50 2 \

• “a” “This is the first option” “off” \.

• “b” “This is the second option” “on”

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Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• Progress Meter Box (gauge)

– It allows you to display a gauge displaying the progress of a given
process.
– For this dialog requires that the output of the process is available
in numerical format.
– The following script shows how it is implemented:
• #!/bin/bash
• declare –i COUNTER=1
• {
• while test $COUNTER –1e 100
• do
• echo $COUNTER
• COUNTER=COUNTER+1
• sleep 1

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

Dialog Boxes with dialog (contd.)

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• done
• }| dialog –gauge “This is a progress bar” 10 50 0

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 Revision no.: PPT/2K403/02

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