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Using zsh, I'm trying to put a step in my ~/.zprofile where I interactively ask a yes/no style question. At first I tried this bash-style approach, but I saw errors of this form:
read: -p: no coprocess
(I'm aware that typically the zsh syntax is different from bash's - I tried preceding it with a sh emulation command - emulate -LR sh - but it made no difference).
This page implied the syntax might be different, so guided by this page and the zsh man page, I tried this instead:
read -q REPLY?"This is the question I want to ask?"
This instead fails with an error of the form:
/home/user/.zprofile:5: no matches found: REPLY?"This is the question I want to ask?"
How can I ask a simple yes/no question with zsh? Ideally the command would just swallow one character, with no need to press Enter/Return, and be 'safe' - i.e. the subsequent test defaults to no/false unless 'Y' or 'y' are entered.
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In that case, we can simply wrap our yes/no prompt in a while loop. #!/bin/bash while true; do read -p "Do you want to proceed? (yes/no) " yn case $yn in yes ) echo ok, we will proceed; break;; no ) echo exiting...; exit;; * ) echo invalid response;; esac done echo doing stuff...
You can use the built-in read command ; Use the -p option to prompt the user with a question. It should be noted that FILEPATH is the variable name you have chosen, and is set with the answer to the command prompt.
-y, --yes, --assume-yes Automatic yes to prompts; assume "yes" as answer to all prompts and run non-interactively.
From zsh - read
If the first argument contains a ‘?’, the remainder of this word is used as a prompt on standard error when the shell is interactive.
You must quote the entire argument
read -q "REPLY?This is the question I want to ask?" this will prompt you with This is the question I want to ask? and return the character pressed in REPLY.
If you don't quote the question mark, zsh tries to match the argument as a filename. And if it doesn't find any matching filename, it complains with no matches found.
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