User Input in Bash

With the previous script, we defined a variable, and we output the value of the variable on the screen with the echo $name.

Now let’s go ahead and ask the user for input instead. To do that again, open the file with your favorite text editor and update the script as follows:

#!/bin/bash

echo "What is your name?"
read name

echo "Hi there $name"
echo "Welcome to DevDojo!"

The above will prompt the user for input and then store that input as a string/text in a variable.

We can then use the variable and print a message back to them.

The output of the above script would be:

• First run the script:

./devdojo.sh

• Then, you would be prompted to enter your name:

What is your name?
Bobby

• Once you’ve typed your name, just hit enter, and you will get the following output:

Hi there Bobby
Welcome to DevDojo!

To reduce the code, we could change the first echo statement with the read -p, the read command used with -p flag will print a message before prompting the user for their input:

#!/bin/bash

read -p "What is your name? " name

echo "Hi there $name"
echo "Welcome to DevDojo!"

Make sure to test this out yourself as well!