Whiptail Examples

Please download/clone this repository and have a play around with the examples
Check the manual on https://linux.die.net/man/1/whiptail or run man whiptail from your terminal for all the juicy details

What is Whiptail?

Whiptail is a program that displays information and input prompts which can be used within the terminal. It works as a drop-in alternative to the dialog command. I have included use cases as individual runnable scripts and a breakdown in this README document below.

Installing Whiptail

Ubuntu

sudo apt install whiptail

Arch

sudo pacman -S libnewt

Download and use this repo

# Download the repository
git clone https://github.com/JazerBarclay/whiptail-examples.git

# Open the folder with the examples
cd whiptail-examples

# Set all the example scripts to runnable (check the files before running them)
chmod +x check-list.sh input-box.sh message-box.sh progress-bar.sh yes-no.sh info-dialog.sh menu.sh password-box.sh radio-list.sh text-box.sh

# You're all good to go and break things!

Examples

Info box

The info box is a simple type of dialog box of text that displays to the user.

whiptail --title "Example Title" --infobox "This is an example info box." 8 70

In this example, title is displayed at the top of the box . The infobox is the dialog body and the final two arguments are the height and width of the box.

There is a bug that makes the Info Box not display on some shells. If this is the case you can set the terminal emulation to something different and it will work.

TERM=ansi whiptail --title "Example Title" --infobox "This is an example info box" 8 70

Message box

The message box is very similar to the info box however awaits the user to hit the OK button to continue past the prompt.

whiptail --title "Example Title" --msgbox "This is an example message box. Press OK to continue." 8 70

Yes/no box

The yes/no input does what it says on the tin. It displays a prompt with the options of yes or no.

# A simple if/then to do different things based on if yes or no is pressed

if (whiptail --title "Example Title" --yesno "This is an example yes/no box." 8 70); then
    echo "YES"
else
    echo "NO"
fi

Input box

The input box adds an input field for text to be typed. If the user presses enter, the OK button is pressed. If the user selects Cancel then

COLOR=$(whiptail --inputbox "What is your favorite Color?" 8 78 Blue --title "Example Dialog" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3)

# The `3>&1 1>&2 2>&3` is a small trick to swap the stderr with stdout
# Meaning instead of return the error code, it returns the value entered

# Now to check if the user pressed OK or Cancel
exitstatus=$?
if [ $exitstatus = 0 ]; then
    echo "User selected Ok and entered " $COLOR
else
    echo "User selected Cancel."
fi

echo "(Exit status was $exitstatus)"

Text box

A text box is similar to the message box however gets the body of text from a specified file. Add --scrolltext if the file is longer than the displayed window.

echo "Welcome to Bash $BASH_VERSION" > test_textbox

# filename height width
whiptail --textbox test_textbox 12 80

Password box

A password box is an input box with the characters displayed as asterisks to hide your input.

PASSWORD=$(whiptail --passwordbox "Enter your new password" 8 70 --title "New Password" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3)

exitstatus=$?
if [ $exitstatus = 0 ]; then
    echo "User selected Ok and entered " $PASSWORD
else
    echo "User selected Cancel."
fi

echo "(Exit status was $exitstatus)"

Menus

The menu dialog can show a list of items that the user can select a single item from. The additional value 16 beside the height and width is the total rows displayable before the menu becomes scrollable.

whiptail --title "Menu example" --menu "Choose an option" 25 78 16 \
"<-- Back" "Return to the main menu." \
"Add User" "Add a user to the system." \
"Modify User" "Modify an existing user." \
"List Users" "List all users on the system." \
"Add Group" "Add a user group to the system." \
"Modify Group" "Modify a group and its list of members." \
"List Groups" "List all groups on the system."

The values are a list of menu options in the format tag item, where tag is the name of the option which is printed to stderr when selected, and item is the description of the menu option.

If you are presenting a very long menu and want to make best use of the available screen, you can calculate the best box size by.

eval `resize`
whiptail ... $LINES $COLUMNS $(( $LINES - 8 )) ...

Check list

The check list dialog is a multi-selectable menu where a single or multiple items in the list can be selected

whiptail --title "Check list example" --checklist \
"Choose user's permissions" 20 78 4 \
"NET_OUTBOUND" "Allow connections to other hosts" ON \
"NET_INBOUND" "Allow connections from other hosts" OFF \
"LOCAL_MOUNT" "Allow mounting of local devices" OFF \
"REMOTE_MOUNT" "Allow mounting of remote devices" OFF

When the user confirms their selections, a list of the choices is printed to stderr.

Radio list

A radio list is a dialog where the user can select one option from a list. The difference between a radio list and a menu is that the user selects an option (using the space bar in whiptail) and then confirms that choice by hitting OK.

whiptail --title "Radio list example" --radiolist \
"Choose user's permissions" 20 78 4 \
"NET_OUTBOUND" "Allow connections to other hosts" ON \
"NET_INBOUND" "Allow connections from other hosts" OFF \
"LOCAL_MOUNT" "Allow mounting of local devices" OFF \
"REMOTE_MOUNT" "Allow mounting of remote devices" OFF

Progress gauge

Syntax: whiptail --gauge <text> <height> <width> [<percent>]

Also reads percent from stdin:

#!/bin/bash
{
    for ((i = 0 ; i <= 100 ; i+=5)); do
        sleep 0.1
        echo $i
    done
} | whiptail --gauge "Please wait while we are sleeping..." 6 50 0

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