Dialog from bash script

Question

I want create a simple graphical (Qt, Gtk, ...) dialog, concretly a simple print dialog, as a "frontend" to lpr, in bash. What I want? How many pages per page, printing interval. It's (at least) two options.

What is the best util(s) to solve this problem?

Answer 1

There is

• dialog (ncurses based)
• xdialog (X11 based)

Other implementations are reported to exist:

• zenity (Gnome)
• kdialog (Kde)

If you use gpm, you can even use the mouse in a console environment. It requires a tty, so it will work over ssh, screen, xterm etc. but not when piping/redirecting.

Both sport more or less the same interface so you can switch depending on whether an X display is available

Here is a dialog script that displays a simple YES/NO box:

#!/bin/bash
DIALOG=${DIALOG=dialog}

$DIALOG --title " My first dialog" --clear \
        --yesno "Hello , this is my first dialog program" 10 30

case $? in
  0)
    echo "Yes chosen.";;
  1)
    echo "No chosen.";;
  255)
    echo "ESC pressed.";;
esac

Replacing dialog by xdialog: