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.

This is a single binary application that utilizes the inquire library for providing a nicer user interface than the typical shell script is capable of.

Platforms

Pre-built binaries are available for:

Install

Install with cargo

cargo install script_wizard

Install with Nix

nix profile install github:EnigmaCurry/script-wizard

Install from GitHub releases

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

Or, install with this curlbomb:

bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EnigmaCurry/script-wizard/refs/heads/master/install.sh) ~/.local/bin

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 piping 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"

Babashka pod

script-wizard can run as a Babashka pod, providing a native Clojure API for all commands (ask, confirm, choose, select, date, editor, and menu):

(require '[babashka.pods :as pods])
(pods/load-pod ["script-wizard" "pod"])
(require '[pod.enigmacurry.script-wizard :as sw])

(sw/ask "What is your name?" :default "World")
(sw/confirm "Continue?" :default :yes)
(sw/choose "Pick one" ["a" "b" "c"])

Pod mode is entered automatically when stdin is not a TTY (i.e., when input is piped), so you can also load the pod without the explicit "pod" subcommand:

(pods/load-pod ["script-wizard"])

When stdin is a TTY and no subcommand is given, the help text is printed instead.

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.

Documentation

Full API documentation on docs.rs