Doing Windows
Using text menus is a step in the right direction, but there's still so much missing in our interactive scripts, especially if we try to compare them to the graphical Windows world. Fortunately for us, some very resourceful people out in the open source world have helped us out.
The dialog package is a nifty little tool originally created by Savio Lam and currently maintained by Thomas E. Dickey. This package recreates standard Windows dialog boxes in a text environment using ANSI escape control codes. You can easily incorporate these dialog boxes in your shell scripts to interact with your script users. This section describes the dialog package and demonstrates how to use it in shell scripts.