The simplest and most widely available method to get user input at a shell prompt is the read command. The best way to illustrate its use is a simple demonstration:
while true; do
read -p "Do you wish to install this program?" yn
case $yn in
[Yy]* ) make install; break;;
[Nn]* ) exit;;
* ) echo "Please answer yes or no.";;
esac
done
Another method, pointed out by Steven Huwig, is Bash's select command. Here is the same example using select:
echo "Do you wish to install this program?"
select yn in "Yes" "No"; do
case $yn in
Yes ) make install; break;;
No ) exit;;
esac
done
With select you don't need to sanitize the input – it displays the available choices, and you type a number corresponding to your choice. It also loops automatically, so there's no need for a while true loop to retry if they give invalid input.
Also, Léa Gris demonstrated a way to make the request language agnostic in her answer. Adapting my first example to better serve multiple languages might look like this:
set -- $(locale LC_MESSAGES)
yesptrn="$1"; noptrn="$2"; yesword="$3"; noword="$4"
while true; do
read -p "Install (${yesword} / ${noword})? " yn
if [[ "$yn" =~ $yesexpr ]]; then make install; exit; fi
if [[ "$yn" =~ $noexpr ]]; then exit; fi
echo "Answer ${yesword} / ${noword}."
done
Obviously other communication strings remain untranslated here (Install, Answer) which would need to be addressed in a more fully completed translation, but even a partial translation would be helpful in many cases.
Finally, please check out the excellent answer by F. Hauri.
Best Solution
Although Curl does support SFTP, support isn't automatically included in the default package.
This website: http://andrewberls.com/blog/post/adding-sftp-support-to-curl provided the details which helped me add the required support for SFTP. As the site didn't work 100% for me, I've outlined the different steps taken below.
Manually downloading libssh2 didn't work for me so I used yum to install the two packages:
and then followed step two configuring Curl to install using the above libraries
The final step was to restart sshd:
There you have it. Double check that SFTP is on the list of support protocols by running
When I initially tested, Curl complained about key authentication issues, but you can force Curl to use any authentication to connect:
This will round robin the different supported authentication methods and let you use you login credentials instead.
I hope this helps alleviate any other headaches for people trying to achieve the same.