You can easily accept user provided input in bash by using the read command in bash for Linux and OS X. Here, we’ll echo out a choice to a user in a script, read the output into a variable called yn and then echo out the response:
echo "Please enter y or n: "
read yn
echo "You chose wrong: $yn"
Here, we used echo to simply write out what was chosen in the input. But we could also take this a little further and leverage a case statement to then run an action based on the choice selected:
read -p "Should the file extension change warning be disabled (y/n)? " yn
case ${yn:0:1} in
y|Y )
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false
echo "The warning has been disabled"
;;
* )
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool true
echo "The warning has been enabled"
;;
esac
The options when scripting are pretty much infinite and chances are, if you’ve written any scripts, you’ll know of a better way to do this than how I’ve always done it. One of the great things about scripting is the fact that there’s always a better way. So feel free to throw any of your examples into the comments!