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Comments on How to prompt a user for an expanded variable in Bash?

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How to prompt a user for an expanded variable in Bash?

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I work with CentOS operating system and my only shell is Bash.

I want to create a script which prompts a user with a question like "What is your web application root?"
The user should answer directly in terminal and the answer would be stored in a variable named web_application_root.

I assume that generally the user would use variables such as ${HOME} (envar) or ${some_medium_directory} (non envar) in its answer, so any variable/s should be expanded.

How to prompt a user for an expanded variable?

I prefer not to use the read shell builtin for this because it requires IFS configuration which at least for now I find as an "overkill".
I don't think I would mind using Node.JS, Python, Perl or any "shell-completing" programming language if I have to, I just want to have something which is working and stable.

python perl linux variable-assignment bash
posted over 3 years ago
deleted user
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Someone‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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How would you want to take input from the user without using read in bash? What is so bad about IFS='' read ... that you would like to use another language instead? Is there more to your solution than simply setting one variable from the values of another? Why is web_application_root="${HOME}" (which makes the variable available and allows for env var expansion) not sufficient in your use case?

Someone‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Also: When ${some_medium_directory} is not an env var, where does it come from?

deleted user wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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Hello! Q1: I don't know :) Q2: I don't understand why IFS isn't on by default for read and to be honest I am not even sure I understand what it does. Q3: I am not sure I understand but probably there isn't more. Q4: web_application_root="${HOME}" is nice but I want to prompt the user for it as part of a bit larger interactive installation program which prompts for data by design. Q5: It might come from the user's preference to represent such a medium directory in a global variable.