Linux Basic — Interactive Scripts Practice

Practice Exercises — Interactive Scripts

Practice writing small interactive helpers using read, select, getopts, and the confirmation pattern.

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Warm-up

1. Prompt for a username and echo it back.
2. Prompt for a password silently (read -s) and confirm it by asking twice.
3. Prompt with a 10-second timeout that defaults to no on timeout.

Validation

1. Ask for a port number and re-prompt up to 3 times if invalid.
2. Read a colon-separated record into user:uid:home with IFS=: and read.

Menus

1. Write a select menu to choose a service (start, stop, status) and run the associated command.
2. Use select with an array populated from ls /opt/tools.

Options & Flags

1. Make a small script that accepts -f (force) and -n COUNT using getopts.
2. Mix --help as a long option handled before getopts.

Confirmation

1. Implement a confirm wrapper and use it to protect a rm -rf simulation.

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Verification Checklist

• All secrets use read -s
• Timeouts have defaults
• getopts uses shift $((OPTIND-1)) to expose remaining args
• select handles invalid numeric choices gracefully

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Next chapter → Menu-Driven Scripts