Dialog is a program that will let you present a variety of questions or display messages using dialog boxes from a shell script. These types of dialog boxes are implemented (though not all are necessarily compiled into dialog):
buildlist, calendar, checklist, dselect, editbox, form, fselect, gauge, infobox, inputbox, inputmenu, menu, mixedform, mixedgauge, msgbox (message), passwordbox, passwordform, pause, prgbox, programbox, progressbox, radiolist, rangebox, tailbox, tailboxbg, textbox, timebox, treeview, and yesno (yes/no).
You can put more than one dialog box into a script:
o Use the "--and-widget" token to force dialog to proceed to the next dialog unless you have pressed ESC to cancel, or
o Simply add the tokens for the next dialog box, making a chain. Dialog stops chaining when the return code from a dialog is nonzero, e.g., Cancel or No (see DIAGNOSTICS).
Some widgets, e.g., checklist, will write text to dialog's output. Normally that is the standard error, but there are options for changing this: "--output-fd", "--stderr" and "--stdout". No text is written if the Cancel button (or ESC) is pressed; dialog exits immediately in that case.
The dialog sources contain several samples of how to use the different box options and how they look. Just take a look into the directory samples/ of the source.
Thomas E. Dickey (updates for 0.9b and beyond)
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Kiran Cherupally - the mixed form and mixed gauge widgets.
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Tobias C. Rittweiler
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Valery Reznic - the form and progressbox widgets.
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Yura Kalinichenko adapted the gauge widget as "pause".
This is a rewrite (except as needed to provide compatibility) of the earlier version of dialog 0.9a, which lists as authors:
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Savio Lam - version 0.3, "dialog"
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Stuart Herbert - patch for version 0.4
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Marc Ewing - the gauge widget.
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Pasquale De Marco "Pako" - version 0.9a, "cdialog"