Prompting with read -p in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Prompting User Input with read -p in Bash

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple script that asks a user for their favorite fruit and then shows a message with their answer.

🎯 Goal: Build a Bash script that prompts the user to enter their favorite fruit using read -p and then prints a message including their input.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use read -p to prompt the user with the exact text: "Enter your favorite fruit: "

Store the user input in a variable called fruit

Print the message: "Your favorite fruit is: <fruit>" where <fruit> is the user input

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Scripts often need to ask users for information like names, choices, or passwords. Using <code>read -p</code> makes this easy and interactive.

💼 Career

Knowing how to prompt users in shell scripts is useful for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and anyone automating tasks on Linux or Unix systems.

1

Create a variable to store user input

Write a line of code that uses read -p to prompt the user with the text "Enter your favorite fruit: " and stores the input in a variable called fruit.

Bash Scripting

# Use read -p to ask for favorite fruit and save it in fruit
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use read -p "prompt text" variable to ask the user and save their answer.

2

Add a variable to hold a greeting message

Create a variable called greeting and set it to the exact string "Your favorite fruit is:".

Bash Scripting

read -p "Enter your favorite fruit: " fruit
# Create a variable greeting with the text "Your favorite fruit is:"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string to greeting using = without spaces.

3

Combine greeting and user input in a message

Write a line of code that creates a variable called message which combines the greeting variable, a space, and the fruit variable.

Bash Scripting

read -p "Enter your favorite fruit: " fruit
greeting="Your favorite fruit is:"
# Create message by combining greeting, a space, and fruit
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes and $ to insert variables inside the string.

4

Print the final message

Write a line of code that prints the message variable to the terminal using echo.

Bash Scripting

read -p "Enter your favorite fruit: " fruit
greeting="Your favorite fruit is:"
message="$greeting $fruit"
# Print the message variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo "$message" to show the combined message.

Try entering apple when prompted to test.