Below are some basic examples of how to create Dialog based Bash scripts for the Linux console. Dialog provides a method of displaying several different types of dialog boxes from shell scripts. The bash dialog example below walks you through a basic “Hello World” shell script using Dialog.

#!/bin/sh
rm /tmp/h.out
while [ 0 ]; do

Create a two option dialog box 11 by 40 characters in size.

dialog --title "Hello World" --menu \
"Select Interface or <Cancel> to exit" \
   11 40 4  \
   "1" "Say Hi!" \
   "2" "Quit" 2>/tmp/h.out

Trap what the user selects into the SEL variable. Values will either be a 1 or a 2 based on our menu above.

SEL="`cat /tmp/h.out`"

Read more…