Better way of accepting variations of ‘Yes’ from a shell prompt

Question

Usability testing of a shell script I wrote found that people had different expectations on how to answer a question that expected ‘yes’ as the answer. See variations in the below code example.

Surely there must be a better way that what I came up with? What is your readable and shorter form take on this?

read -p 'Answer this question with yes: ' answer
if [ "$answer" = 'Y'
  -o "$answer" = 'YES'
  -o "$answer" = 'Yes'
  -o "$answer" = 'y'
  -o "$answer" = 'yes'
  -o some-alternate-condition ]; then

  echo 'Surely this can be written better?'
fi

Voted to close. While I'm interested in the question, it's probably more of a programming question, so should be on SO. — phunehehe, May 22 '11 at 15:50
A programming answer might be something like Bash: Check if array element exists — phunehehe, May 22 '11 at 15:57
@phunehehe: I disagree with moving to SO, not only because we have a history of accepting shell programming, but also because it's not just a question of how to do it but also a question of what the spec should be. — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', May 22 '11 at 16:00
I wrote a script much like that once. Then the program was translated to French and Simplified Chinese. I skimmed the French version and saw my prompt was translated to "Enter oui or non" but of course the code still wanted "Y" or "N" — Ben Jackson, May 22 '11 at 21:38

score 49 · Answer 1 · answered May 22 '11 at 18:37

49

The UNIX standard provides example code for this using the locale utility:

if printf "%s\n" "$response" | grep -Eq "$(locale yesexpr)"
then
    affirmative processing goes here
else
    non-affirmative processing goes here
fi

The value for 'yesexpr' in the POSIX locale (and on English locales on real systems) is "^[yY]". It is to be interpreted as an extended regular expression. See also noexpr.

answered May 22 '11 at 18:37

Random832

10,666

1

Nice. But I seem to be an idiot. Where can I find a list of the arguments that locale knows about? The man page on my Mac OS 10.5 box doesn't seem to have them. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten May 22 '11 at 20:48
Nice. Could you please link back to the source? – Daniel May 22 '11 at 21:51
3

@dmckee you can do locale -k LC_MESSAGES (and for the other LC_whatever), or see here for ones defined by the standard. @Daniel what source other than the locale utility page that I did link? – Random832 May 22 '11 at 22:20
1

Great answer, should definitely be the accepted one. – jlliagre Sep 16 '13 at 11:52

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered May 22 '11 at 15:57

14

Using a case is somewhat equivalent but not perfect since statements like YE are accepted.

read -p 'Answer this question with yes: ' answer
case "${answer}" in
    [yY]|[yY][eE][sS])
        echo 'Surely this can be written better?' ;;
esac

answered May 22 '11 at 15:57

sakisk

2,873

3

I would say the user’s intent is pretty clear from ‘ye’. – Daniel May 22 '11 at 18:29

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered May 22 '11 at 15:58

Staying in bash (or any other shell if you display the prompt independently):

case $answer in
  [Yy]*) echo Ok;;
  *) echo "Can't you read? I said to say yes.";;
esac

This accepts responses like yn as yes, y (with an initial space) as no, and wlkjzuhfod as no, which may not be optimal but is consistent with typical shell prompts: that's how rm -i, find -ok and others do it.

This eschews the whole issue of internationalization: in other languages, you would need to translate expected responses. There's no standard shell method then; you can turn to dialog, but then your script will require it to be installed (it's available in many distributions but not always installed by default).

if dialog --yesno "Choose yes" 0 0; then …

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 27 '12 at 21:01

3

I usually use a simple function:

Confirm() { read -sn 1 -p "$* [Y/N]? "; [[ ${REPLY:0:1} = [Yy] ]]; }

The function just returns 0 if Y or y is entered and 1 if anything else is entered. It can be used with if...fi:

if Confirm "Type y or n"; then
echo "You typed y"
else
echo "You typed n"
fi

Or just like this:

Confirm "Type y" && echo "You typed y"

edited Jan 27 '12 at 21:01

Kevin

40,767

answered Jun 05 '11 at 09:29

Chuck Metcalfe

39

Take off the -s to have a visual history of what what was typed. – Tom Hale Sep 11 '16 at 10:47

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 16 '13 at 11:35

Just re-modified @faif ans

YesOrNo() {
        while :
        do
                read -p 'Do you want to Continue (yes/no?): ' answer
                case "${answer}" in
                    [yY]|[yY][eE][sS]) exit 0 ;;
                        [nN]|[nN][oO]) exit 1 ;;
                esac
        done
}


if $( YesOrNo ); then
        echo "Ans is yes.. Do something....."
else
        echo "Ans is No... skip.."
fi

Test

root@ubuntu:~# bash confirm.sh
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?):  # if Blank Enter then ask again
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?):
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?):
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?): no
Ans is No... skip..
root@ubuntu:~# bash confirm.sh
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?):
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?):
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?): ye
Do you want to Continue (yes/no?): yes
Ans is yes.. Do something.....

Better way of accepting variations of ‘Yes’ from a shell prompt

5 Answers5