Summary

As always, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, and saw some cool stuff. We began with a discussion of yad, and how to use it to create graphical user interfaces for shell scripts. We then looked at how to use dialog to create user interfaces for text-mode environments, and xdialog for graphical environments. As an added bonus, you saw how to create scripts that will run with xdialog on machines that support it, and dialog on machines that don’t.

These actually aren’t the only three utilities that you can use to create user interfaces for your scripts. Other choices include whiptail, cdialog, and zenity. The good news is that once you’ve learned one, switching to another is fairly easy.

Now, you can do more with these utilities than I’ve been able to show you here. On the other hand, none of these utilities is suitable for creating anything that’s really complex. For that, you’ll need to learn a more complex...