[wellylug] Default value in read

[Daniel Pittman]

Sigurd Magnusson <sigurd at silverstripe.com> writes:

> Its fine to do this...
>
> read -p "Please provide domain name, without www prefix, e.g.
> google.com: " domainname ;
>
> But how do I do this?
>
> $defaultvalue=google.com
> read -p "Please provide domain name, without www prefix, e.g.
> google.com: " $defaultvalue domainname ;
>
> (In which I want the user to be able to be able to EDIT the default
> value, as most times the default is correct, or needing a minor change,
> e.g. ".com" might change to "co.nz" )

Portable, in the shell only?  You can't.  The canonical version of this
in portable shell is:

  default='google.com'
  echo -n "Enter the domain: [$default] "
  read myvar
  if [ x"$myvar" = x"" ]; then myvar="$default"; fi

If you want to do something non-portable you could look and see which,
if any, shell offers readline support, but I don't think it is worth it.

Regards,
        Daniel
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